Chapter 6. Multiproject Builds

Large projects are typically broken up into separate modules with independent build lifecycles. Each subproject has some kind of life of its own, perhaps with a development team assigned to it alone, and certainly with a test suite of its own which is worthwhile to run apart from the project as a whole. However, any large system that is broken into pieces must also be reintegrated together, implying the need for a master build that combines all subprojects into a single integration test suite and set of release artifacts or processes. A next-generation build system will be equipped to provide a flexible framework for dealing with real-world project differentiation and integration.