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This is more of a "read the actual article" article.

And come on; the first key to pain-free building is "Keep the rate of failure relatively low and the length of breakages short"? Well yeah.

Dave,

Fair point on the first key. I had my girlfriend proof the entry before posting it and she said the exact same thing. However, as the crew back in the office was discussing the actual practices, many of them were important because they helped "actually break the build less" and when the build does fail, fix it quickly. It's obvious, but at the end of the day, I felt it needed to be said. It's worthwhile on its own, and to provide some structure to the practice recommendations.

We also see that if a "low" rate of build failures is "X" having 5X build failures actually hurts more than five times as much. The erosion of confidence in the build, the risk of checking out busted source code, and the lack of something to hand off to QA doesn't seem to grow linearly. While the other tenants are very important, reducing the rate of build failures is pretty key and the practices do offer a handful of suggestions for doing that.

Cheers,

Eric

I guess lately I'm used to working in places where any of the builds, in a bad month, might break once or twice for 20 minutes, so I don't see the non-code-related consequences as much as some might. Broken window theory and all that :)