Jenkins CI association

How can I associate Ncrunch command line tool to Jenkins?

I'm afraid that I can't provide direct guidance on this, as I have no knowledge of Jenkins or how to configure it.

The console tool essentially just takes a series of parameters and will run against a solution file. The tool outputs a number of reports that contain the results in human and machine readable form. I'd suggest treating it similar to a 3rd party build or test runner. I'm sure Jenkins will have some way of executing a command line call against the solution file in a way that will let you retrieve the output.

I'm also interested in running the command line from jenkins.
Even though you can easily any command with ease from it, I was wondering if there is any way of being able to use ncrunch only for the testing / reporting part.
I would prefer to use our in-house system for generating the artifacts and simply give these as inputs to ncrunch.

emanuelvarga wrote:I'm also interested in running the command line from jenkins.
Even though you can easily any command with ease from it, I was wondering if there is any way of being able to use ncrunch only for the testing / reporting part.
I would prefer to use our in-house system for generating the artifacts and simply give these as inputs to ncrunch.

Unfortunately, this just isn't possible with NCrunch, as NCrunch's build is fully integrated with its testing system. For NCrunch to be able to run tests in a consistent manner with a dev machine, it needs to first workspace, build, then instrument assemblies. Although a normal build system can produce binaries, it doesn't perform the same workspacing and instrumentation tasks that are needed by NCrunch. This means that even if a feature existed in NCrunch that would let you use a CI's output binaries, you would receive results with no code coverage data and the manner of execution would not be consistent with dev machines (making it harder to troubleshoot problems).

Ok, the coverage part would not be possible, ok, for that there is sonar that provides a lot of customizations.

The biggest advantage to ncrunch for a build machine would be the parallel test execution (and maybe even grid running of tests?). This feature is currently not available in any test runner currently (correct me if i'm wrong).

emanuelvarga wrote:Ok, the coverage part would not be possible, ok, for that there is sonar that provides a lot of customizations.

The nice thing about using NCrunch in your CI is that you get build, test and coverage results all in one step. If you use a different product for code coverage, you'll need to run all the tests twice :)

emanuelvarga wrote:
The biggest advantage to ncrunch for a build machine would be the parallel test execution (and maybe even grid running of tests?). This feature is currently not available in any test runner currently (correct me if i'm wrong).

Parallel test execution is becoming more common now in other products. Most of them still perform this multi-threaded within the same process, which is quite limiting .. but I'm not yet aware of any runners that can scale horizontally across a grid in the same way that NCrunch can.

It's worth remembering that it is an advantage to have your CI behaving the same way as your local dev machines. If you employ a range of different systems and products to perform your CI steps, you run the risk of having a problem in your CI that doesn't appear on your dev machine. CI problems can be time consuming to troubleshoot and can have a significant impact on team productivity.