Why are dashboards important? In a nutshell, they allow you to visually present information in a way that is meaningful to the reader. They allow the reader to immediately see trends, and more importantly, quickly make decisions or change behavior in order get better...
DevOps
Enhancing Electric Commander Build Processes by Creating Dynamic Job Steps
In a simple, straight-forward implementation of a continuous integration pipeline you would typically create a chain of procedures that perform the same set of operations on the supplied input. This provides a build process that is well-defined, repeatable,...
Electric Commander: Performance Comparison Between ectool and ec-perl
Prior to version 5.2, Electric Commander has offered two primary ways to access the API for scripting purposes: ectool and ec-perl. Both allow users to accomplish virtually any task within Commander, but it’s important to note there is a significant performance...
Electric Commander: Transferring Homepage Settings Between Users
The Electric Commander homepage allows you to bookmark links and job configurations for easy access. It's easy to add one or two, but if you have a lot of links and you want to share them with other users so that they have the same links as well, its a lot of work to...
Electric Commander: Configuring an Alternate Plugins Directory
Electric Commander, now known as CloudBees CD, allows you to set up an alternate location for your plugins directory. This is a two step process and it's easy to forget the second step. If the second step is not done, the system can appear to still be functioning...
Using Ship.io to Implement Coding Best Practices for Native iOS and Android Apps
Mobile application developers have a new tool in their arsenal when it comes to increasing their software quality and speed of production. With the recent launch of their new site, Ship.io, Electric Cloud is looking to bring Continuous Delivery to native iOS and...
Getting Started with Electric Cloud’s ntest Tool
Electric Cloud (now known as CloudBees CD) has released an open-source tool called ec-testing for unit testing Electric Commander procedures. In this video below, David Hubbell demonstrates how to download the tool, set it up, and run example test cases....
Improve your build, test and deployment with ElectricCommander
Repeatability is a intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it must come down. If you throw it twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down. When repeatability doesn't occur we get anxious. Repeatability is equally an essential quality in...
ElectricCommander Custom Dashboards: How to Visualize Your Build Data
Whenever I get a chance to see any kind of motor racing I am amazed at how many displays the engineers use to watch and monitor all the data coming from the cars. Modern performance racing cars produce a lot of data about the engine, tires, fuel consumption,...
Why an Automated Development Process Benefits Developers
Automated development, rather than just automated builds, offers a more holistic approach to automating the development process including building, testing and deployment. It is the cornerstone of Continuous Integration (CI). CI uses a model of small incremental...
A Brief History of Automated Builds
Almost every programming book starts with an example of a small program which can be compiled from the command line using a simple call to the compiler with maybe a few flags. Known as “Hello World”, the few lines of code needed to output the text is almost universal....
A Six Step Setup Process for Incorporating CSS and jQuery into Your Electric Commander Plugin
Let's suppose you've been tasked with developing a custom dashboard for your Electric Commander installation to show off some real-time stats about your software development process. If you read my previous article about displaying Commander metrics in a GWT...