Historically, build automation was accomplished through makefiles. Today, there are two general categories of tools: ;Build-automation utility :This includes utilities like Make, Rake, CMake, MSBuild, Ant, Maven or Gradle etc. Their primary purpose is to generate build artifacts through activities like compiling and linking source code. ;Build-automation servers: These are general web based tools that execute build-automation utilities on a scheduled or triggered basis; a continuous integration server is a type of build-automation server. Depending on the level of automation the following classification is possible:
Build-automation utilities allow the automation of simple, repeatable tasks. When using the tool, it will calculate how to reach the goal by executing tasks in the correct, specific order and running each task. The two ways build tools differ are task-oriented vs. product-oriented. Task-oriented tools describe the dependency of networks in terms of a specific set task and product-oriented tools describe things in terms of the products they generate.
Build-automation servers
Although build servers existed long before continuous-integration servers, they are generally synonymous with continuous-integration servers, however a build server may also be incorporated into an ARA tool or ALM tool. Server types
On-demand automation such as a user running a script at the command line
Triggered automation such as a continuous integration server running a build on every commit to a version-control system.
Distributed build automation
Automation is achieved through the use of a compile farm for either distributed compilation or the execution of the utility step. The distributed build process must have machine intelligence to understand the source-code dependencies to execute the distributed build.
Build automation is considered the first step in moving toward implementing a culture of Continuous Delivery and DevOps. Build automation combined with Continuous Integration, deployment, application-release automation, and many other processes help move an organization forward in establishing software-delivery best practices.
