Martin Fowler states the following when discussing Continuous Integration (CI) builds: Try to speed up the commit build. Continuous Integration on a build of a few hours is better than nothing, but getting down to that magic ten minute number is much better. This usually requires some pretty serious surgery on your code base to do as you break dependencies on slow parts of the system. CloudBees Accelerator has traditionally been used to speed up the compile portion of the CI build, but it’s capable of much more. Unit tests , code coverage and static analysis suites often grow to the point where CI cycles are much longer than the “magic” ten minutes. CloudBees Accelerator shortens these suites by splitting them up and distributing them across a cluster. I recently worked with a prospective client to accelerate their Boost unit testing and MS Visual Studio code coverage suites. They parallelized extremely well, providing up to 11.5x speedup.
 Unit test and code coverage suites parallelized at a fine granularity across 5 agents running on a single machine. |
The Result:  |
 Because the suites are split up at such a fine granularity, the time decreases when agents are added to the cluster. |
The Result:  |
For more details on this use case and how you can use the same approach to shorten your CI and test cycles , check out the replay of my webinar . Watch the Webinar »