A Workflow is a series of activities performed in and around a build. An activity can be any sort of Command Line process for your operating system, such as executing a build with Make or Ant, calling a source-code-management (SCM) tool, or using any of the time-saving custom activities provided for you such as the plug-ins that have been developed for many SCM tools. Within each plug-in are specific activities from which users can choose to develop Workflows. Activities within each plug-in allow users to access SCM tools automatically, thus eliminating the user’s need to re-invent the process for every tool.
The Workflow Editor is the primary user interface used for developing Workflows and their associated activities. The Workflow Editor also allows you to streamline your Workflow by setting dependencies between activities. With dependent activities, you can send e-mail messages confirming that the execution of the activity was successful or alerting recipients that a specified activity failed. Workflow dependencies allow you to execute a release script to move the production executables to an install directory after a successful build. To further simplify activity execution, environment variable configurations can be managed activity by activity or through templates and global profiles.