The typical build process consists of several steps, including obtaining the latest version of source files, building the application, creating the installation package, and so on. Some of these steps for example, the compile process, can be split into several independent tasks that can be carried out in parallel by multiple computers. These build processes, whose workload is distributed among several cooperative computers within the network, are called distributed builds.

In Automated Build Studio, you can distribute the macro workload among multiple build servers using special operations of the Remote Macro Execution category:

• Remote Group - Runs part of a macro on a specific remote computer.
• Remote Macro Command - Runs a macro on a specific remote computer.
• Remote Execution Stack - Runs parts of a macro on several remote computers in parallel.

You can visually specify operations to be executed on remote build servers and define a set of computers that will participate in the build:

In addition, if the build servers have multiple CPUs, you can take advantage of concurrent execution of operations to run individual operations on each build server in parallel and speed up the build process even more.

With the distributed build feature provided by Automated Build Studio, you can:

• Reduce build time.
• Perform parallel builds.
• Build multi-platform products.
• Run builds and tests on different machines. And a lot more.

Since distributed builds run faster than usual (non-distributed) builds, you can run them more often, which is an essential part of the continuous integration strategy.