Remove The Smell From Your Build Scripts

From NeoWiki

Paul Duvall, CTO, Stelligent Incorporated

10 Oct 2006

How much time do you spend maintaining project build scripts? Probably much more than you'd expect or would like to admit. It doesn't have to be such a painful experience. Development automation expert Paul Duvall uses this installment of Automation for the people to demonstrate how to improve a number of common build practices that prevent teams from creating consistent, repeatable, and maintainable builds.

I dislike the term "smell" when it comes to describing something like code. It feels strange to speak anthropomorphically about bits and bytes. It's not that the word "smell" doesn't accurately reflect a symptom that indicates that code may be wrong, it just sounds funny to me. Yet, I am choosing to perpetuate my vexation to describe software builds because, frankly, many build scripts I've seen over the years stink.

Often, even great programmers have difficulty constructing a build script; it's as if they recently learned how to write procedural code -- writing large monolithic build files, copying-and-pasting scripted code, hard coding attributes, and so on. I've always wondered why that is (maybe because build scripts don't get compiled into something a customer will eventually use?). Yet, we all know that build scripts are central to creating the code the customer eventually uses and if those scripts are a big ball of mud, creating that software efficiently becomes challenging.

Thankfully, you can easily employ a number of practices on a build (whether it be Ant, Maven, or even a custom one) that will go a long way toward keeping your builds consistent, repeatable, and maintainable. One effective way to learn how to create better build scripts is to see what not to do, understand why that is the case, and then see the correct way to do something. And in this article, I take that approach. I detail the following nine most common build smells you should avoid, why you should avoid them, and then how to fix them:

• IDE-only builds
• Copy-and-paste scripting
• Long targets
• Large build files
• Failing to clean up
• Hard-coded values
• Builds that succeed when tests fail
• Magic machines
• A lack of style

Although this is not meant to be a comprehensive list, it does represent some of the more common smells I've encountered over the years in build scripts I've read and written. Also, some tools, such as Maven, which are designed to handle much of the plumbing associated with builds, can help alleviate a portion of these smells, but many of these issues can occur no matter which tool you use.