Software Build Maintenance​: Errors and Efficiency

Abstract

Complete and correct build dependencies are critical to successful builds and are often violated and ignored by practitioners using MAKE, one of the widely used build systems. Incomplete declarations of build dependencies can lead to incorrect or inefficient builds. In addition, software products provide many configurations to accommodate different environments and requirements. Building multiple configurations is a pressing need. The current common practice is to perform a clean build for each configuration, which is both expensive and time-consuming. Incremental builds have been shown to be suitable for building multiple software configurations. This means incrementally building one software configuration on top of another. A proper build order accelerates the build of the whole set of software build configurations.