Meister's Build Management Solutions for the Development Manager

Meister reduces development cost and increases control by simplifying the build process.  Meister provides your developers and build specialist with a set of build "power tools" needed to mashup builds between IDEs and the builds running on the continuous integration server.  It also provides them the build forensics necessary for quickly debugging applications, and identifying what artifacts went into any particular build process. 

Delivering the details about builds in a transparent and easy to use interface provides your team the information they need - when they need it.   OpenMake Software provides free workflow management and Continuous Integration Builds with Mojo, but addresses the entire build management challenge with Meister from the creation of binaries to deployment.

Build Mashups between the Individual and the Team

Important to the development manager is the ability to keep each developer's unique IDE activity in sync with the activity managed outside of the developer's private work space. Most developers use IDEs such as Eclipse or Visual Studio to write their code.  When inside the IDE, developers simply click on a build button to compile their unique object.  However, when the developer is ready to check-in their code and have their changes added to the centralized build, they must first stop and update build scripts to make sure their changes to not break the build.  Meister performs this mashup step automatically, keeping the individual developer build in sync with the application team build.  This also means that the pre-production build is not broke because of surprise changes that were not reflected in the pre-production build scripts.  Meister keeps everything in sync for you, with the push of a button.

Reducing Redundant and Costly Manual Scripting

Meister's build framework allows your developers to write highly reusable build scripts that can be shared across the enterprise.  This means that your developers spend less time writing manual scripts, which become frequently out of date, and more time writing business applications.  Keep your project on schedule by reducing the number of scripts your developers need to write and maintain using Meister.  In most cases, development teams move from managing thousands of build scripts to using a small handful of non-redundant, reusable Build Methods.  Meister is the only build management tool that minimizes the redundancy found at the build scripting level.  Our competitors eliminate scripting only at the ALM workflow level such as check-out scripts, email scripts, testing scripts and deploy scripts.  These ALM scripts do not make up the core of your script library.  The majority of scripts are written to support the "build" itself, meaning compiling and linking. Meister supports reuse at both levels.

Team Coordination

Meister directly benefits the coordination of development activities by centrally managing the build meta data. Through this central management,  enterprise developers are able to coordinate the introduction of changes into the development while keeping all teams in sync.   Meister uses an innovative method of knowledge gathering to integrate builds and to predict build impact. Meister easily supports Lean Methodologies as well as those environments where the development to deployment lifecycle is strictly monitored and audited.

Build Virtualization and Cross Platform Builds

In the enterprise development environment,  builds call multiple compilers supporting multiple languages from .Net to Java and C-Unix. Meister improves software quality by managing build engines and providing repeatability between development and pre-production builds. Meister's build engines support Windows, Java, AIX, Sun Solaris, HP, Linux and z/OS.  Using Meister all builds can be standardized, regardless of the language or OS they require.  A build can include both calls to the Java compiler and the .Net compiler using the same standardized process.  Through Build Services and Build Methods, the build can be virtualized across the enterprise.

Build Best Practices

Consistency and repeatablity in your build process will help you keep your projects on schedule.  With Meister's Build Services, you can write a single build script that will support hundreds of .exes, .dlls, .jars, .wars and .ears in exactly the same way with no redundant scripting.  Support your lean methodology techniques by eliminating the confusion and redundancies often found in ad hoc scripts.  Write one script to support many builds versus one script to support one build. 

ANT or Make

Meister can perform a build that will create a combination of final targets, from Java targets to C targets. This flexibility means that development teams no longer need to write one part of the build process in traditional Make and the Java portion in XML and ANT. Meister can handle multiple development tools in one build pass.

Customization through the SDK, Plug-ins and Build Methods

Meister provides an open SDK that allows Java developers to customize the build process to fit their unique development needs. Meister supports a wide variety of development tools and compilers without any customization requirements using Plug-in.  In addition,  developers can write their own reusable Build Methods to standardize their build process according to their needs and demands.