Using ant to solve problems posed by frequent deployments

Abstract

Deploying a system in an agile development environment presents its own set of challenges. If it is true that development cycles are short and that every release is as small as possible, then we are going to be releasing software much more frequently than with other methodologies. Related to this is the concept that the system is never finished, and deployments have to occur throughout the lifetime of the system. This paper examines some of the problems posed by this type of deployment environment and suggests how Ant can be used to solve them. An appendix describes concrete solutions to problems encountered on a real-life medium-sized project.