JetBrains has announced TeamCity 7.0 with an eye on wooing developers who seek productivity-enhancing tools to support distributed build management and continuous integration (CI) processes.

The new version release has been built with additional provision for incremental builds and unit testing (specifically suited for Maven, Gradle, and IntelliJ IDEA projects) and there is also support for extended build chains and visualization.

The JetBrains team says it has addressed build failure conditions with renewed empathy and concern; it has also brought in branch graphs to illustrate change history (in Git and Mercurial) and now uses TeamCity as a native NuGet feed server.

"TeamCity is many different things to many types of companies and users. To meet their diverse needs, we took a closer look at various user experiences and tried to improve them all around," said Pavel Sher, TeamCity project lead. "To further facilitate complex build workflows, we've added build chain visualization, typed parameters and powerful build failure conditions. Our customers with a large number of agents will benefit from more predictable agents distribution among projects. As always, there are many usability enhancements for all users."

NOTE: TeamCity is a continuous integration server for developers and build engineers. It is free for small teams.

JetBrains is fond of quoting enterprise software evangelist Martin Fowler for a convenient definition of continuous integration. Fowler's classification in full does make enjoyable reading:

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily — leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.