What are daily builds?
For a large, complex sofwtare with many components, daily builds are perhaps the most important quality assurance mechanism. In a nutshell, daily builds consist of building the complete tool (re-compling and linking all the components), deploying and then testing the tool. It ensures that the components remain compatible with each other and can be integrated together, even as the individual developers work on adding features or fixing bugs. Lack of daily builds in a developmentprocess introduces large cost and quality risks into integration, testing and stabilization of the software. Daily builds have also been called the “heartbeat” of the software — a successful daily build (compile, link, delpoy, test) means that the software is alive and well.
