BioWare picks ElectricCommander

BioWare has chosen Electric Cloud’s ElectricCommander, a software production management solution that allows studios to achieve the Agile ambition of ‘continuous integration’.

It does this through simple one-button ‘pre-flight’ builds, which check and test changes before code is checked-in, letting developers know about errors before they have the ability to affect global builds.

Bioware says it’s been using the technology for almost a year, applying it to the forthcoming RPG Dragon Age: Origins.

“We were looking for a solution that would shorten the build process and reduce the number of broken builds,” said Aaryn Flynn, director of programming at BioWare.

“We recognised that this was costing us a lot both in terms of productivity and employee engagement. Our team is are now using a preflight build and test approach using ElectricCommander along with ElectricAccelerator, giving them the results of their changes across all platforms and dependencies within 12 minutes – a 75 percent reduction.

"With this robust testing combined with automatic check-ins, our developers have greater confidence when they submit their code for check-in. When their changes do cause an error, the check-in is rejected, they get timely feedback on the error and they have not impacted any other developer in the group.”