What's the ROI of using a build tool like ant or nant?

Posted by leeand00 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by leeand00
Published on 2010-05-28T19:22:14Z Indexed on 2010/05/28 19:52 UTC
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ROI

To me this sounds like a really stupid question.

Why would you not use a build tool?

However, I need to explain my co-worker why he should be using a build tool of some sort.

He's getting really into the idea of working as a team with more programmers, but he isn't understanding the bigger picture of what needs to change in the build process in order to work with a larger team; (i.e. defensive programming/unit testing your code, having a bug database, programming modular libraries, and using sub-repositories to store modules in version control.

This is a rather large stack of technologies that I need to prove the ROI of...so I figured I'd start with the ROI of using a build tool rather than just...say...clicking compile.

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