Atlassian's build and release infrastructure uses dozens of build agents to run hundreds of builds every day. Needless to say, it's a critical part of how we deliver great software to our customers!

Jim Severino is a member of the internal systems team at Atlassian who is responsible for our build infrastructure. At Summit 2010, he gave a 10-minute lightning talk about Atlassian's best practices for maintaining and continually improving our builds.

Canary Builds

One of the coolest practices that Jim highlights are what he calls "canary builds". These are builds that should always pass, and will only fail if there is a problem with the build infrastructure. By running canary builds to identify when there are infrastructure issues (and then quickly fixing those issues when they do arise), Atlassian's developers have more confidence in the correct-ness of build results.

To learn more about canary builds and other best practices at Atlassian, check out this 10-minute recording of Jim's talk:

Want to check out the slides?

Jim's presentation, as well as all the other great presentations from Atlassian Summit 2010 are available at the Summit 2010 website.