Meister Benefits for SCM Administrators

OpenMake Meister offers 100% automation, the key to a standardized and repeatable build to release process. OpenMake Meister delivers a build to release solution that allows you to establish consistency and repeatability starting at the methods used by your developers to create your executables and ending with a process for iintegrating best of breed application life cycle tools into your change process.  Meister goes beyond the competing tools, letting you control and automation the compile and link process, as well as the pre and post steps around the compile and link.  Meister ensures that the source code you are managing in your SCM repository matches the executables running in your production environment, letting you know unambiguously what is in production.  Key benefits ot he SCM Administrator includes:

• Bridging Development Source to Production Binaries
• Separation of Duties
• Dependency Management and Impact Analysis
• Build Best Practices
• Secure Build Environments
• Build Transparency
• ALM Tool Integrations
  

Bridging Development Source to Production Binaries

Why are builds important to the source code administrator?  Because it is the build that determines what source code will be build, packaged and delivered to your production environment.  OpenMake Meister maximizes your investment in an SCM solution by guaranteeing that your production executables are traceable back to your SCM repository. Meister offers you maximum protection from failed releases by providing the DNA and fingerprint evidence that links production back to its development origin. Meister guarantees that the SCM team can repeat the same build that was executed by the developers, without needing the developer to hand-hold the process.  OpenMake Meister gives the SCM team the knowledge and tools to take control of the software builds.

Separation of Duties

OpenMake Meister provides a process that allows developers to "promote" their build to a production control team creating a separation of duties between development and production release. SCM administrators can enforce the use of "approved" source code and libraries in the production build, ensuring that no source code is released to production untested or unapproved.

Dependency Management and Impact Analysis

OpenMake Meister allows SCM administrators to trace project to project and project to infrastructure relationships, providing a predictive analysis of any software release. Our Build Audit reports provide a complete picture of how, when, and where the build was performed, enabling the build to be easily reproduced to support emergency release procedures.

Build Best Practices

OpenMake Meister standardizes builds by allowing you to establish Build Best Practices throughout your organization.  Build best practices creates consistency in the build process and better supports agile development activities such as continuous integration builds.  If your developers talk about using Maven, they are attempting to standardize their builds.  OpenMake Meister standardizes builds for the enterprise supporting Java, Microsoft Visual Studio, LINUX, C-UNIX and z/OS.

Secure Build Environments

Secure your pre-production build process using Meister's User and Group Security.  Meister can be implemented with LDAP allowing you to create a build process that restricts certain Users or Groups from executing Builds and Workflows that touch a production or pre-production site.  Enforce your separation of duties using Meister's User security and privileges.

Build Transparency

Auditing builds can be difficult if you only have ad hoc scripts to rely on.  With Meister, full control of the build process can be handed to the Production Control or SCM teams - without having to hand over large numbers of make and ant scripts.  All details of the build can be easily reviewed, such as the state of debug or optimization flags, and the use of production versions of third party libraries to ensure production compatibility.  This critical data is hidden in ad hoc scripts and is far from transparent.  And with Meister Insight,  your builds can be executed with a full Build Audit report showing all artifacts used in the build, even when they are not under SCM control.  See our Build Audit Report below.  Notice that the file "rt.jar" was not stored in the ClearCase repository, but identified by Meister's deep dependency discovery.

ALM Tool Integrations

OpenMake Meister integrates with the leading source code management, testing and software distribution tools - both open source and commerical.  Application Life cycle Managment tool Plug-ins provide the out of the box integration with dozens of ALM tools for creating your automated build to release process. It's also easy to create your own Plug-ins, to extend Meister to include your in-house developed or less comon tools.