Cruisecontrol is Great for Firmware, Too

I have been playing with an idea of setting up a nightly build server for the embedded project. I started hacking together a simple Python script executing automated GNU Make build, analyse the output, and generate notification emails to stakeholders. After a while I stopped and thought "this sounds all too familiar". I decided to take another look at Cruisecontrol, which would also get us straight to continuous integration instead of just nightly builds. With great help from Lasse Koskela's article "Driving on CruiseControl" I was able to create a simple Java project compiled with Ant and automated with Cruisecontrol. This was the out of the box solution. I was able to proceed to my original problem, automating an embedded project integration. Lasse's article refers to older version of CC, and it did not have the "exec" builder plugin. So I downloaded the latest version. It BTW has a ready made Java example that you can launch right after extracting the thing. OK, so I changed the config.xml to use CVS instead of Subversion and then use "exec" builder plugin to launch the GNU Make script for our C source. I opened my browser, directed it to local server, and ta'daa - our first project was driving on cruisecontrol! I will make the config.xml available after I clean it up.




We have written few unit tests in the project (some even in TDD fashion), but they use embUnit framework which is not able to spit out xml, so unit test results are not published by our CC yet. At the moment I'm concidering two options:

1. updating the existing tests to use CUnit
2.writing a script to translate results from embUnit to simple xml output