Customer Experience
Quickbuild is the best build and configuration management software we have used. We use the software to automate build and test process across two geographical locations on multiple platforms (windows and mac), the build agents are deployed inside our datacenter, I am happy to note that we restarted the Quickbuild server only twice in a year. The software is used 24 hours by about 200 engineers and everybody is extremely happy with easy to use interface. The administrators are impressed as well with stability and tools that are available to monitor the server and build grid. We also drive VMWare labamanager environment within Quickbuild for full build and test automation with one click and that has worked extremely well. Overall deployment has increased our productivity and quality of our product.
You can always count on top of the line support, kudos to Quickbuild team, keep up the awesome work.
QuickBuild is a fabulous and easy to maintain build tool and we at Cisco for project "Cisco Security Manager" have it for our builds and have no plans to change. It's very user-friendly, gets easily plugged with LDAP and easy to maintain always. Variables that can be provided with builds are really handy to tweak many things as is the need of the project.
STAR feature of QuickBuild is the build promotion, by using which we can promote a build to cater any of our requirement(s). Cisco CSM project uses this to archive builds in permanent storage, and create new branches that is forked from an identified good build to start off a branch feature/main. The most important thing about QuickBuild is the product support which is unprecedented and Excellent always!
When I first discovered QuickBuild, I was amazed at its ease of use. All of the basic things I needed to do for my company builds was provided right out of the box. Other products I evaluated required scripting even for very basic things like source code checkout. QuickBuild's features of build configuration inheritance and java-like scripting integration has saved me many hours of administration and maintenance headaches. I can change my defaults at the top of the build configuration hierarchy and all children configurations are automatically affected.
With the introduction of QuickBuild 2, I have been able to drastically improve my build efficiency through the new build grid technology and load balancing algorithms. I went from a painful 5 hour build in QuickBuild 1 to a lean 2 hour build with QuickBuild 2. My users are also benefiting from QuickBuild 2's new reporting technology. They can more quickly diagnose their build problems as they are now more clearly revealed in QuickBuild's web interface. QuickBuild support has been fantastic via email and their active user forums. Any bugs I have found are usually fixed within 1 day and are available for me within 1 week. Even some of my enhancement requests were implemented making QuickBuild 2 the perfect build automation product for my company. I have evaluated many others and I cannot find any that have the full feature set available with QuickBuild 2.
iPhone Bookshelf
BookShelf and ShelfServer's builds have moved from running on Hudson to QuickBuild. I gave Hudson an honest try, but the object-oriented approach to configuration management in QuickBuild is something I just don't want to live without. Considering I maintain separate distribution paths for beta/release and for full/LT, having to duplicate all of the build settings for each project/branch was getting old...
QuickBuild allows you to define common elements of a build at a top-level configuration. Each separate release (Full_Release, Full_Beta, LT_Release, etc.) has its own sub-configuration which only overrides the bare minimum that differs between the releases. For most of my builds, that means only one or two variables. Everything else -- source control settings, build scripts, paths, environment variables, etc. is all shared among the multiple configurations. The end result is that going "live" requires minimal configuration changes from what's been tested for weeks or months at a time in the Beta configurations. Fewer variables means fewer bugs, usually....
Quickbuild is key component of our Continuous Integration Framework. Two years back we were looking for a reliable and scalable build engine and even though we explored many options in this space, Quickbuild was the only one which was exactly mapping with the needs of distributed agile product development environment. The convenient and powerful concept of inheritance and overriding makes the creation of build plans extremely easy. Quickbuild is not just a build engine but such an interesting framework that helps in automating almost everything around builds. Apart from managing end to end build activities with a single click, Quickbuild helps us in automated deployment in staging environment, automated execution of test cases, and creation of release notes.
GarageGames
I'm right now about waist-deep in getting several major codebases of ours into one unified base, building under QuickBuild, testing automatically, etc. So far QB has been fantastic to work with (as always) and very easy to get to do what I want. We'll be using QB heavily throughout the critical path of our development - from automated builds & smoke tests to producing the final installers we'll be posting to our licensees. I don't know if it's the best build system on the planet but it's the best I've yet worked with.
QuickBuild is a key component in our development process. We've tried a number of open source continuous build solutions but found that the quality of QuickBuild and the excellent support we receive was well worth the investment. The ability to 'inherit' configurations is one of the many killer features in the product. This enables us to maintain numerous branches and have them built automatically when developers commit code to our Subversion repository. The web interface is easy to use and the initial installation was a breeze. We've been a QuickBuild shop since the early betas of the product and will continue to be so for many years to come.
TravelToday.net
We have many production servers that our application runs on, each having two instances of the application. The deployment process before QuickBuild was somewhat automated, but required whoever was deploying the code to change certain build properties with each execution of the build. It was very tedious and cumbersome to say the least, and also prone to error. QuickBuild has made our deployment process much simpler by keeping track of all of our build properties for each server and instance, as well as sending notifications when the build is complete. All we now have to do is click on the link for each server and kick off the build. QuickBuild handles the rest.