Standards Development

Scope

This document defines the requirements of capabilities of build and deployment tools to support and automate build, package, and deployment work. This document is intended for use in evaluating and selecting build and deployment tools according to the procedures defined in ISO/IEC 20741. By using these two standards together, objective and rational results can be derived for the evaluation and selection of build and deployment tools. This document is independent of development methodologies and approaches (such as Waterfall, Agile, or DevOps).

Purpose

Purpose:

Defining capabilities of build and deployment tools for the evaluation and selection.

Justification:

Build and deployment tools have long been an indispensable tool but, nowadays, it plays an incomparably important role. In the past, build and deployment tools consisted of a compiler and a linker bundled with the OS, and it was a simple mechanism to create an executable code from the source code written in a programming language. However, an application software is currently built with the source code and the libraries which are distributed and managed across multiple servers. In addition, testing and operating a system typically requires deploying the system to a large number of servers. Similarly, changes in the development environment have become a factor in increasing the importance of the role of build and deployment tools. Dramatic changes in the development process have also impacted to the increasing importance of the role of build and deployment tools. For example, repeated development called agile has become a common and needs to be released every few weeks. And, in order to realize a practice called DevOps, which aims to shorten the time from system development to normal operation, it is indispensable to automate the work with build and deployment tools.

Many modern build and deployment tools are available now on the market which are independent of the vendor that provides the OS. Because the modern build and deployment tools are able to configure as independent automation tools on top of compilers and linkers bundled with individual OS, as well as repositories that manage assets.

From a user's perspective, it is important to choose the right tool from a variety of build and deployment tools, especially in large organizations. It is imperative that tool evaluation and selection be done in accordance with fair and public standards. To this end, ISO / IEC 20741 was published in 2017 as a guideline for the process of evaluating and selecting software engineering tools. However, ISO / IEC 20741 does not mention the standard capabilities specific to build and deployment tools because it is generalized without depending on a specific tool category.

This document defines the requirements of capabilities of build and deployment tools and is intended to be combined with ISO / IEC 20741 to select the appropriate tool. For this purpose, this document provides a list of capabilities in the build and deployment tools with its category. The capabilities introduced in this document are collected from existing tools.