SUNNYVALE, California, December 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Electric Cloud(R), the leading provider of software production management (SPM) solutions, has released SparkBuild(TM), a free software build tool that makes developer builds up to ten times faster. SparkBuild helps developers overcome the challenges inherent in build avoidance techniques and makes debugging faster and easier. It is free for both commercial and non-commercial projects, and can be downloaded at www.sparkbuild.com, an online community featuring SparkBuild discussion forums, how-to videos, and documentation.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091214/SF24963LOGO)

SparkBuild is the culmination of Electric Cloud's years of experience creating software build-test-deploy solutions that support Agile development techniques. SparkBuild includes ground-breaking new build avoidance technology that enables the fast, frequent local builds that are a requirement in Agile environments. Build results are displayed graphically, making it easy to pinpoint and correct errors. It's based on the technology developed for Electric Cloud's commercial enterprise tools including the ElectricAccelerator(R) distributed build system, and the ElectricInsight(R) build visualization tool.

To date, developers have been forced to choose between slow and safe or fast and dangerous desktop builds, said Mike Maciag, Electric Cloud CEO. Electric Cloud solved the build speed and accuracy problem for full builds with our ElectricAccelerator product. Now we're leveraging our expertise and technology to provide this benefit on the developer desktop with a free tool.

Enterprises hire software developers to write great code. Waiting for a build to complete or taking time to debug a broken build is time that is not spent creating great code. Worse, errors can be introduced in a production build when a developer tries to save time by avoiding or partially building their changes prior to checking in code, techniques which often produce incorrect results.

One of SparkBuild's key features is the ability to avoid unnecessary work by automatically reducing a full build to the smallest subset of critical changes. Traditional build avoidance techniques like object re-use and incremental builds often break builds, creating more headaches than they solve. To reliably avoid those problems, developers are forced to recompile the entire application when making changes, even though an individual's changes may affect only a small portion of an application.

Electric Cloud is taking a fresh approach to the problem with subbuilds, a technology which identifies and builds only the components that are essential to a developer's current focus. This delivers fewer broken builds, huge time savings and the ability to compile and test frequently and without affecting the rest of the team, a critical Agile development practice.

SparkBuild can be used with or without Electric Cloud's commercial solutions. It is the latest addition to Electric Cloud's SPM portfolio, which provides specific solutions for agile development, test automation, build management, build acceleration, and geographically distributed development.

About Electric Cloud

Electric Cloud is the leading provider of software production management (SPM) solutions. Electric Cloud solutions automate, accelerate and analyze software build-test-deploy processes to optimize both physical and virtual IT environments. The company's patented and award-winning products help development organizations to speed time to market, boost developer productivity, and improve software quality. Leading companies across a variety of industries, including semiconductors, enterprise IT, ISVs, mobile devices, and transactional Web sites rely on Electric Cloud's Software Production Management solutions to transform software production from a liability to a competitive advantage. For customer inquiries please contact Electric Cloud at +1-408-419-4300 or www.electric-cloud.com.

(c) 2009 Electric Cloud, Inc. All rights reserved. Electric Cloud, ElectricCommander, ElectricInsight, ElectricAccelerator, Electric Make and SparkBuild are trademarks of Electric Cloud. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE: Electric Cloud

CONTACT: Liz Haas of Atomic PR, +1-415-402-0230, Liz (at) atomicpr.com