Building

Building is the process of transforming the human-readable source code files into binary machine-level executable files by combining configuration items, using building scripts, make files, compilers, linkers, and other tools, and creating a version of a software program. Building can take from a few files to several hundreds or thousands of files, making it a delicate process.

While every developer must perform test builds in the workspace before checking in, to ensure the changes made do not break the repository state, when it comes to building the entire configuration and to releasing a project version, different policies have to be applied. If the workspace solution configuration is successfully being built in the local workspace, this doesn't necessarily mean that the repository configuration will successfully build also. This is because its state is changed every time a user checks in his or her changes.

Every once in a while someone will forget to check in a new file or a...