ThoughtWorks, a global IT consulting and software company, today announced the general release of Cruise, a continuous integration and release management application that enables Agile development teams to release software with a new level of confidence. By enabling fully automated, auditable deployments, Cruise lowers the risk associated with releasing complex applications. It is aimed at software developers, testers, Information Systems professionals and project and program managers. IT Directors will also recognize the advantages of the product as the time of their development teams is freed up to focus on technological innovation that benefits the organization as a whole as well as the addition of meaningful features. Jez Humble, product manager for Cruise said: "ThoughtWorks has years of experience helping customers rapidly deploy working software into production. Cruise embodies the lean continuous integration and release management techniques we have developed to serve our clients.� Humble added, “Releasing software need not be a painful, time-consuming and error-prone process. Cruise’s simplicity, scalability and unparalleled power gives teams control over their build, testing and release processes, so they can focus on delivering great software to their users. With this platform, teams of all sizes and skillsets can now benefit from Agile software practices." Cruise is designed by ThoughtWorks, creators of the open source application CruiseControl, the original continuous integration system. Cruise addresses gaps in other product offerings such as lack of support for splitting a build into multiple related stages and zero configuration build clouds. Cruise introduces the powerful concept of pipelines, which make it simple to manage and test changes in an application from check-in through deployment. For the first time, software teams can go live with new, tested features quickly and consistently. Cruise is the second commercial software product in the ThoughtWorks suite. Mingle, an Agile project management application launched in July 2007, is already on its third major release, and is being used by more than 75 companies globally. ThoughtWorks is offering a free 30-day trial of Cruise (on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux), following which it will remain free to use for teams requiring two or fewer software agents. In addition, Cruise will be available at reduced or no cost for most open source projects, academic institutions and non-profit organizations. For more information on Cruise including pricing, please visit: www.thoughtworks.com/cruise

Just a sidenote, we can't click the hyperlink.

We used cruise for years... Looks like a cool app though.

I wonder how this would compare to Atlassian's Bamboo which seems to have the same basic feature set (if not more) than Cruise. jz

We use Hudson (moved from CruiseControl) - free CIS. Why use non-free, if there are free with more features.

We use Hudson (moved from CruiseControl) - free CIS. Why use non-free, if there are free with more features.

I have played with Hudson and it looks really cool. Haven't worked with CC, would appreciate if someone more experienced could provide more detailed comparison between these solutions. Which one is subset of the other in terms of functionality?

I have played with Hudson and it looks really cool. Haven't worked with CC, would appreciate if someone more experienced could provide more detailed comparison between these solutions. Which one is subset of the other in terms of functionality?

Which open source CI tool is best suited for your application's environment?

I tried Hudson, Bamboo and Cruise. So far Cruise has left me with less frustration as far as displaying reports (checkstyle, junit etc) is concerned. Hudson is good, but sorry to say that it can simply become a nightmare if you want to setup public -private setup i.e. open public Hudson for viewing and private one for building and then publishing to public one. The Publishing mechanism does not work (unless you run Hudson as standalone app and not in the container). I spent about a week on Hudson and in the end decided to look for alternatives. Had some problems with Bamboo and now trying the Cruise. Btw if you use 2 remote agents then Cruise is free too. aj

I use Bamboo 2.x and love it. I've tried CruiseControl in the past and have recently looked at ThoughtWorks Cruise. I find CruiseControl to be very painful and Cruise looks promising, but seems to lock you in a bit to their development methodology. Bamboo has been very easy to configure and also extend. Version 2.x is a big step forward from the 1.x versions. Recently I posted an article about using Bamboo along with Jira for full release management automation. https://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50231 I think one of the key points as to why pay for Bamboo vs. a free solution is that Bamboo, Jira, Confluence, Fisheye, and Clover all easily integrate with each other and they are are very extensible. -JD

The main advantage Cruise offers over Bamboo, TeamCity and Hudson is that it supports modelling a workflow as a first-class concept. So you can put in a commit stage, a functional testing stage, a performance testing stage, UAT stages etc. and Cruise will roll up the results of all these so you can see at a glance which revision of your software is in which environment and deploy a particular version to a particular environment at the click of a button. This makes the scenario Jonathan describes in his blog trivially easy with Cruise. The development methodology lock-in is a simply FUD -- Cruise is completely flexible and doesn't care which methodology you use. I am a bit confused as to how it would be possible to make a CI tool lock you to a particular methodology frankly.

We use hudson for all our projects. jsptube.com

Is this intended to say that the product is restricted to that market?