Reformation Technologies is a Software Development & Software Process consulting firm. We specialize in making process improvements within a software development team that provide dramatic improvments to the quality and maintainability of your code as well as the overall confidence that each developer has in every build that they release.
One of the strategies that we use to dramatically improve the quality and maintainability of the code is through Continuous Integration. Continuous Integration incorporates several software development practices including Source Control, Scripting builds, Unit Testing, and Automating builds.
The idea behind it is that when a developer checks in code, the build automatically compiles the source code, runs the suite of Unit Tests, deploys successful builds and emails build failures to notify the appropriate managers/developers so that problems can quickly be addressed. The longer it takes between code checkin and the discovery of a BUG the greater the cost of fixing that BUG.