Build Automation Tools: Current Scenario, Practices, and Challenges

Current Scenario, Practices, and Challenges

Build automation techniques and tools have emerged as a significant component for ensuring seamless integration and continuous delivery. In the present-day scenario, there are certain build automation practices that are being deployed to improve the existing processes. Some of these include:

Maintenance of a central code repository
Making the build as self-testing
Testing in a clone of the production management
Quicken up the build time execution
Maintenance of revision control system for
the project’s source code

Challenges

While build automation tools have several benefits, they have their own unique set of challenges, including:

Selection of the right tool
Correspondence of project requirements and tool features.
Scalability of the builds and its deployment.
Expectations of the build to detect occurrence of new defects during the project creation.

The industry-wide adoption of our three selected tools is shown below [Figure 4]. While the adoption of Maven has continued to rise steadily over the years, Bazel has been in decline around. There is a sharp uptick in the adoption level for Gradle.

Figure 4: Line graph based on timeline analysis of tools

Maven Trends

Provides allowance to a developer to understand the entire state of a development under within a short period of time.
Provision of easy guidance for project creation.
Maven provides more than 200+ plugin-in to work with which is one of the remarkable trends seen in the Maven tool.

Figure 5: Maven real-time applications [Sample size: 100] (Source: References)*

Maven Challenges

Tool is unreliable since it can collapse the software development lifecycle due to the limitless number of loops present in IDE.
Existence of pom.xml files make it difficult for usage when it comes to large codebases, since the number of XML files increases.

Gradle Trends

Establishment of incremental annotation processing to increase the effectiveness of incremental annotation.
Collaborative debugging in Gradle hugely helps in scanning of multiple scripts at one glance, reducing the processing time.
Supports user customization at a maximum rate.

Figure 6: Gradle implementation for real-time applications [Sample size: 100] (Source: References)

Gradle Challenges

Changes in environment variable pose a challenge for tracking it.
Lack of adequate documentation requirements of Groovy DSL [Dynamic structured language] to write the build configuration.

Bazel Trends

Supports multiple project integration with toolchains and platforms.
Aims to excel at supporting multiple platforms and mixed language basis of project development.
In architectural implications, Bazel avoids cyclic dependencies.

Figure 7: Bazel implementation for real-time applications [Sample size: 100] (Source: References)*

Bazel Challenges

Explicit listing of dependencies makes the build process a tedious and a repetitive task.
Bazel uses sandboxing to ensure the build correctness, but sandboxing creates over head in performance.

User Analysis

It is therefore evident that Maven leads the field in terms of adoption by offering more user-friendly features for developers and programmers.

Figure 8: Usage analysis of Maven, Gradle and Bazel Tools across industries [Sample size: 100] (Source: References)*