When more than one developer is working on a software project, from time to time the team members need to integrate their changes to the project’s codebase and then run a build to see if the renewed code can be built and, if the build succeeds, and if it works without errors. These builds (they indicate the “health” status of the entire project) are called integrated builds. Normally, they are performed occasionally (e.g. right before the deadline) or regularly (for instance, weekly or daily). It is hard to locate errors that arise in integrated builds that are performed rarely, since the number of changes introduced between the previous and current builds may be tremendous. To reduce the number of errors revealed in integrated builds and to make it is easier to find errors, you should perform these builds as often as possible. Ideally, builds should be performed right after the source code of your project has been modified. This will help you continuously maintain the integrity of your codebase - it will be much easier to find errors that appeared after modifying the source code, because you will always know which source files were changed for this build. It is also recommended that each build be tested and reported appropriately. By following this strategy, you will always be able to provide developers and users with a working build compiled using the latest versions of the source files. The strategy is called continuous integration (http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/integrateoften.html). It works well if:

As you can see, Automated Build Studio supports all of the prerequisites of continuous integration. In addition, it includes facilities that allow you to practice continuous integration of your projects in full. The main facility is a dedicated Windows NT service called Automated Build Studio Service.You can configure this service via Build Studio’s user interface to track all the changes in files of the specified project under source control systems such as Visual SourceSafe, Subversion, CVS or Perforce. To reduce the amount of time spent on interaction between the service and source control system and to lower the use of resources, the service does not poll the source control repository constantly, it does this at certain time intervals.

Thus, using Automated Build Studio as a continuous integration solution lets you get reliable up-to-date automatic builds of your software at any time.