Concepts

Build management. AnthillPro allows for distributed and multi-platform building. Every time AnthillPro builds a project, it publishes the artifacts -- including docs and binaries -- to AnthillPro's embedded artifact and dependency management system. This allows AnthillPro to provide extensive information regarding your builds, especially for Continuous Integration: Most of the SCM integrations allow for commit triggers, changelog parsing, etc.

When properly set up, many -- if not all -- pieces of your builds will be repeatable, standardized, and traceable because your current processes are automated as part of the configuration process. See Setting Up a Build to get started.

Deployment management. AnthillPro's deployment management features allow you to use the same deployment scripts across all your environments, so you can automate your deployment processes while enforcing standards throughout your organization.

AnthillPro's binary promotion model and artifact repository ensure that you are using the exact same binaries from environment to environment. And to account for environmental differences, AnthillPro allows you to set job-iteration, environment-specific properties, etc. See Setting Up a Deployment for more on how AnthillPro deals with deployment management.

Dependency and artifact management. Complex projects can depend on dozens of subprojects, and even simple projects might use half a dozen libraries or more. To deal with these complexities, AnthillPro has a built-in dependency and artifact management system called Codestation.

Codestation enables you to track and visualize dependencies across libraries and subprojects based on version numbers or release statuses that you control. Because Codestation is part of AnthillPro, there is no need for a third-party management system -- dependency management is performed through the AnthillPro UI. (If you don't use AnthillPro for dependency management, you can still use it for build and deployment management, as well as process automation.)

Codestation is also used to manage the artifacts generated by every build. Through the UI, you can configure which files are available as a dependency to other projects, which files should be included in a deployment, as well as the files you want sent to the testing lab. See Dependency Management for more.

Tool integration and data aggregation. AnthillPro integrates with leading tools used throughout the application lifecycle. Most integrations go beyond a simple command-line integration to include data aggregation (e.g., parsing of the output, knowledge of the tool options, etc.).

For example, when AnthillPro gets the changelog from an SCM, that information is stored in the AnthillPro data warehouse and then made available through the UI. For integrations with issue trackers, AnthillPro can add a comment to an existing issue, or even create an issue in the other tool. And for testing integrations, AnthillPro collects test results and can then provide you with metrics for both a single build and for many builds over time -- or even fail a build based on test results. See Tool Integrations for more on any of the individual integrations.

Process automation. As you start building projects and configure AnthillPro with your SCM, testing, issue tracking tools and more, it becomes clear how all of the parts fit together to automate your processes: AnthillPro enforces automation throughout the entire application life-cycle, which in turn makes managing your projects easier. For more advanced users, AnthillPro offers host of advanced authoring features that enable you to add additional automation to your AnthillPro processes: Including the creation of automated operations or processes, full access to the API (see Tools > Anthill Development Tools) and the ability to write your own Plugin.