The Build Grid — Seven in One Blow!
The process of making builds and testing code is much like preparing a fine meal. The chef needs to take care of numerous tasks: vegetables need to be rinsed, chopped and prepared; soups and sauces are made from scratch and demand constant stirring and attention; main courses are often complex and might need to be fried, breaded and then baked.
Likewise, programmers need tools to help them manage their long list of routine tasks as they plan and develop their product. Today's applications need to be tested on different operating systems with various environments, not to mention with different types of databases and/or server applications.
Fortunately for the chef, she has a kitchen full of professional tools and a sous chef and other subordinates to look after the details. Until now, the developers' toolbox was lacking in this department. TeamCity fills this void.
The TeamCity Build Server provides developers the professional tools they need to implement the industry's leading practices. TeamCity simultaneously runs and manages a number of computers called Build Agents, which together make up the Build Grid. Build Agents run each of the different operating systems and environments that you need to test under, and their processing power is fully leveraged to maximize build productivity.
The backend server itself runs neither builds nor tests. Its job is to let you efficiently manage agent tasks and stay on top of all build and test processes run on each and every agent.
As developers code, they can quickly test their changes because the Build Server automatically distributes the changes to a number of Build Agents, which then make personal builds in various environments simultaneously. Server-side code coverage, code inspections, code duplicate analysis, and stress and regression tests can also run concurrently. Test results are all relayed back to the Build Server so the developers can track the results right in the IDE and/or setup a range of notifications while they continue to code. TeamCity effortlessly conquers the daunting and routine tasks programmers dread (and make them feel like Jack the Giant Killer).
See TeamCity features at work on this Live demo server.