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Probably asked a million times, but here goes... What is Mindscape's philosophy/mentality regarding nightly builds? Specifically, do they undergo as much testing as release builds? I often see posts recommending getting the latest nightly build, but for our product, packaged for use in production enterprise environments, I am wary to include a "nightly build" as THE build in our distribution. In other words, how safe is it to use? Should I just stick with the "release" build, even though it's older and may not contain as many fixes as a nightly build? Have you ever had nightly builds come back as critically flawed? Thanks LightSpeed! Thanks Mindscape! ~Bill Moller |
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Hi Bill, Short answer: They don't get as much testing, but they still get A LOT of testing. Long answer: Every nightly build goes through our full test suite. This consists of more than 25,000 unit tests now (5 years of adding them!). If a single failure occurs then the nightly build won't go out the door. Given the nature of a framework, user level testing isn't something we can do every single day. What we do leading up to formal releases is we incorporate LightSpeed into our own production systems - this website and about 25 other systems we have running. We monitor them for any errors. Traditionally, we don't see errors from this process because the test coverage and quality is so high (sorry, sounds like bragging!). That's not to say LightSpeed is perfect - people do report bugs, and we do fix them and add a test to monitor for regressions. Generally speaking, the only time you may run into an issue would be if we've fixed a bug and you had relied on that buggy behaviour in your system. More likely you would just report an issue, we'd fix it, you'd grab a nightly and sail on happily. My general recommendation: You should feel comfortable using Nightly Builds as we've invested a lot to make sure they're generally very high quality. I would however recommend that your own systems have some good tests so you're not updating LightSpeed then shipping to production right away :-) Or, if you want some good error reporting your system you could always add Raygun to the mix: http://raygun.io (sorry, I couldn't resist -- but it is good!). Anyway, I hope that gives you an insight into our nightly build process of LightSpeed! Feel free to add any more questions you might have :-) John-Daniel Trask |
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