Top 5 Signs It's Time to Upgrade Your Mac CI Build Infrastructure

Is your homegrown Mac mini build farm keeping pace with your organizational growth? Or have builds started to feel like watching the sands of time in an hourglass? Truth be told, most dev teams that work on iOS and macOS projects start out just that way. And frankly, it seems to work just fine until it doesn't. So, in an effort to save you from an unnecessary headache, the MacStadium team has put together the following top five signs it's time to be making a change for the better.

1. A single power cord is all that lies between you and the darkness.

We hear variations on this theme all the time from folks who are looking for a simpler, cleaner and more reliable CI solution. We won't hold it against you if you pin it on the Roomba this time, but as the old adage goes, "Unplug me once, whoops. Unplug me twice, here we go again...". In all seriousness, the potential for untimely delays borne of a non-redundant power supply warrants some genuine consideration.

2. Your team's developers keep hogging the community ping pong table while they "wait for a build to build."

If deployment day is more like a field day for your development team, you might be in need of some infrastructure upgrades.

3. "Refocus" is a word that echoes through your halls.

It may be that your development team is losing more ground than meets the eye in exchange for the security that CI offers. Consider the possibility that a given developer has been tasked with solving problem "X." After wrestling with some complex logic, he or she is ready to push changes to the repo, only to find that conflicts have arisen – or that tests are failing. The longer that the developer is away from the problem (i.e. build time) the greater the chance that he or she will need to reengage with the problem to be solved. This sort of thing amounts to an often unaccounted for loss of valuable time.

4. Your estimated time to delivery is dying the death of a thousand paper cuts.

Estimated times to delivery are inherently elusive targets for development teams, but if you find yourself slipping farther and farther behind schedule, it's probably time to look at the prevalence of various time sucks that are eating into your bottom line. You guessed it. We'd suggest taking a look at your infrastructure.

5. Your team has started referring to you as "the duct tape guy."

If you find yourself, "giving it all she's got, Captain!" only to have to continually manage a series of cascading problems or failed builds, you might consider whether the root of the problem actually lies in your infrastructure.

Do one or more of these technical hardships sound all too familiar? If so, it may be time to upgrade your Mac CI build infrastructure – and MacStadium is here to help.

Learn more about our products or talk to one of our sales engineers so we can customize the perfect upgrade solution for you and your team.