2019 saw automation continue its march into development and workflows across the world. Automation software will continue to integrate into workplaces throughout 2020. Automation build tools are the softwares that compiles the source code to machine code. The main function of these tools is to speed up the whole software development process for enterprises. These tools are used to automate the process of software build creation and also processes like packaging binary data and running automated tests. In short, they allow developers to get to the final executables as soon as possible while managing the many trivial tasks.

As the development process varies according to the choices of programming languages, target platforms and deployment methods, these build automation tools too. These tools are categorized into two main types- Build Automation Utility and Build Automation servers. Here we’ll use the best build automation tools. Before proceeding, let us have a look at benefits of Automation tools-

Advantages Of Using Build Automation tools-

• Saving time and money.
• Keeping a history of builds and releases. It will help in investigating the issue.
• Dependencies on key personnel will be eliminated through these tools.
• It will accelerate the process.
• It will perform redundant tasks.

Top 7 Build Automation Tools-

1. Apache Ant-
Apache ant is the best open-source build automation tool for Java. It is fundamentally the same as in terms of design and also usage. Ant is intended for Java applications and it requires the Java runtime. It uses an XML document to define program creation workflow rather than plaintext Makefiles. Ant makes it simple to adopt TDD (Test Driven Development) and hence is suitable for Agile development.

Features-

It offers various in-built functions that eases the writing of portable automation scripts.
It is simple to write the XML build instructions since they are hierarchical, ordered, and cross-linked.
Open source codebase of Apache Ant allows developers to access and also modify source seamlessly.
Apache Ant provides well documentation support and also is available for all major Linux distributions.

2. Gradle-
It is an open-source platform and can be used for multiple project types for example mobile applications to microservices. It has functionalities for building, automating, and also delivering software. For dependency management, it provides the functionalities like transitive dependencies, custom dependency scopes, file-based dependencies, and so on.

Features:

• Gradle allows the use of any programming language for software development.
• It can deploy on any platform.
• Supports monorepos and also multi-repo strategy.
• It helps you to deliver continuously.
• It has various execution options like Continuous build, task exclusion, Dry Run, composite builds and so on.

3. Buck-
This automation tool is developed by Facebook and released as an open-source product. It allows developers to use small, modular components and offers support for a wide variety of popular programming languages and computing platforms. It has gained popularity because of its modular design, that is easy to create reusable builds. Also, the open-source codebase is hosted on GitHub, due to which developers can extend the tool according to their requirements.

Features-

It reduces incremental build times and makes use of various CPU cores for speeding up build processes as much as possible.
Users can use the buck project command to integrate Buck with popular Linux IDEs like PyCharm and Eclipse.
As the buck only allows pre-defined inputs, the results will always be the same regardless of which system you are using.
For developers, it eases the understanding of build dependencies using buck query command.

4. TeamCity-

Developed by Jetbrains, it is a powerful build management and CI tool. It is a popular proprietary build automation tool that supports major features by modern pipelines. TeamCity focuses on reusable components and also allows developers to easily check code quality. You can use an intuitive user interface for viewing build histories, user management, integration and extensions. Have a look at the features of TeamCity-

• It offers various useful integrations like, Apache Maven, Visual Studio Team Services, GitHUb, Docker and so on.
• It offers a few features for system support, including the ability to take backups, restore them, and showing disk usage analytics.
• Designers can scale-out TeamCity build agents dynamically on Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Azure, and Kubernetes clusters. *This CI server can be customized by using service messages in the build scripts, TeamCity REST API, or official TeamCity plugins.

5. Codeship-
Know more at- [https://solaceinfotech.com/blog/top-7-build-automation-tools-for-modern-software-development/]