Hi Todd, I second Thibaut's views on the 'why' of NAnt. The point about craftsman -> industrial is an important one.
If you consider software activities to be part of a Innovate -> Iterate -> Standardise -> Commoditise chain then any kind of work that you handle manually will at best achieve some ground in Standardise. NAnt pushes things towards Commoditise. An effective management argument would be related to: - The use of developers for development rather than configuration. - The reduction of risk through the use of the standard delivery processes (repeatable, on demand, guaranteed) - The reduction of cost of operations specialists for handling delivery processes and the cost of developers handling delivery processes. These can be quantified through measurement of time spent handling releases (timeboxed cost and estimations for projects) and qualified through the customer or project experience of on-demand delivery. Additional qualification is achieved through the visibility of strict standards for the provision of unit test results, ndoc provision and so on. As Thibaut said, all of NAnt's can be achieved without NAnt, but you do not receive any of the gains described above. The core message about good delivery processes is that with high risk at the point of delivery there is a good chance that problems will occur at precisely the point the customer sees the product (possibly for the first time) and therefore perceptions about the product/project are immediately negative. NAnt limits this risk. Support processes are improved because we are able to respond to requests for change more rapidly because we KNOW we can deliver quickly and effectively. (I've worked on systems where the change is not the problem, the real nerve-wracking bit is releasing the thing!) As an example, my shop is not especially agile - we use a fairly regular waterfall approach. Before we implemented NAnt (and continuous integration) delivery would occur at most a couple of times during the main development cycle. We now deliver the product dozens of times during the development cycle. We don't suffer from failed deliveries. Best of luck, Marc Author: Expert .NET Delivery with NAnt and CruiseControl.Net http://bitarray.co.uk/marc -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 31 May 2005 17:05 To: nant-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Nant-users] Why use Nant? I have been using Nant for quite awhile now and am extremely happy with it. I would not use anything else but my organization is questioning why we should be using Nant and not just use Visual Studio to do our builds. I am having a hard time replying back to management in terms that will be understood. My group is trying to make Nant a standard that will be adopted by my organization for development with .Net. Anyway any feedback would be extremely helpful!!! Help, -Todd ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by Yahoo. Introducing Yahoo! Search Developer Network - Create apps using Yahoo! Search APIs Find out how you can build Yahoo! directly into your own Applications - visit http://developer.yahoo.net/?fr=offad-ysdn-ostg-q22005 _______________________________________________ Nant-users mailing list Nant-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nant-users This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated. If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system. Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately. Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received. Further communication will signify your consent to this. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by Yahoo. Introducing Yahoo! Search Developer Network - Create apps using Yahoo! Search APIs Find out how you can build Yahoo! directly into your own Applications - visit http://developer.yahoo.net/?fr=offad-ysdn-ostg-q22005 _______________________________________________ Nant-users mailing list Nant-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nant-users
