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For organizations that depend on software innovation, a slow software build process can be
a bottleneck for the entire company. Slow build times not only impact engineering
efficiency, they also affect product quality and company agility. Furthermore, diagnosing
build problems is difficult or impossible: cryptic output in Make log files can be hard to
decipher and is difficult to relate to the individual build steps in a large build. Electric
Cloud's core products, ElectricAccelerator and ElectricInsight, solve these problems by
reducing software build times dramatically and providing graphical insight into the
performance and structure of builds at a level impossible with existing tools.
The solution to the build speed problem is at a first glance simple: create a distributed
version of industry standard build tools (such as GNU Make or Microsoft NMAKE) that
distributes individual job steps in parallel to a cluster of inexpensive servers. Over the
years, many attempts have been made to create "parallel" or "distributed" build systems.
However, none are in widespread use due to dependency issues and distributed computing
problems that lead to broken builds.
Electric Cloud, Inc. has developed an automated dependency management system that
makes parallel builds safe, scalable, and efficient. ElectricAccelerator is a software build
accelerator that significantly reduces software build times by distributing the build over a
large cluster of inexpensive servers. ElectricAccelerator uses its patent-pending
dependency management system to identify and fix problems in real time that would break
traditional parallel builds. ElectricAccelerator plugs seamlessly into existing Make-based
infrastructures, and includes Web-based reporting and management tools.
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