Daily Builds

I often hear about how important it is to run daily builds. Since I have my source tree in a state where I can check out a clean copy and build it, I decided to turn that process into an automated script. I created a cron job (Oh how I love the UNIX underpinnings in MacOS X) which runs the build script every morning at 6am. The result of the build (if unsuccessful) will come via e-mail. I first check my personal e-mail every morning around 7:00, so I'll know if something went wrong fairly soon after the build is done. Since I do not have an automated process that packages the result of the build (yet), this script really only checks to see if the source didn't compile and link. I don't think I'd be silly enough to check in something that didn't build, but now I can be sure that my script is making sure of that. Today, I'm going to try and add a few more unit tests to my collection. Once I package up all my unit tests (which are too few and useless right now to warrant running on a regular basis), I plan to run them as well during the automated build.