Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl

A major challenge for software organizations is creating software that can continue to adapt and change over time, a code base the team can live with. This paper reviews the lessons learned from CruiseControl, a popular tool for continuous integration. CruiseControl is an open source success story not only because it has had over 400,000 downloads but also because it includes contributions from over 200 different people. For practitioners who are tired of brittle code that must be discarded and rewritten CruiseControl provides valuable lessons.