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Discussion on: What's the longest build time you've experienced?

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Christian Engel

I was working for a client once where the build time in Jenkins would be about 40-60 minutes. The thing is, they would tear down and recreate their whole fleet of services (which actually ran on one single machine). When you committed a line of javascript for a web form, EVERY Java backend service would be rebuilt and deployed.

The build server was constantly running. Bonus points: if ANYONE made a mistake which made the build crash, the process would be stopped. Anyone got the right to commit revoked. An analysis would be made by a dedicated person on who was to blame for the build crash. Then THIS PERSON alone got commit rights granted to fix the build. When it was running again, everyone would be granted the right to commit again. There were dozends of people working on the same repository (all code of all projects in one properitary microsoft repo - using git was forbidden).

It was so much fun. 😐

At one point I build a small app that displayed a dashboard on a dedicated computer screen we placed in our office to show:

  • Is the build green?
  • Can we commit at all?
  • When will the build approximately be finished and the next turn will start?