This case-study by Rosetta Stone shows how using Cruise for Continuous Integration has enabled the development group to adopt an easy and reliable process to build and deploy a complex product like Rosetta Stone across multiple platforms.

1. CASE STUDY
cruise
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ROSETTA STONE Embrace Change.
Deliver Certainty.
Release Management
Becoming A Heavyweight
Bene ts of Cruise
Rosetta Stone Development Teams Move to Cruise
Achieve Increased CI Reliability and Flexibility
Flexibility
Various development teams at Rosetta
Stone use Cruise in di erent ways, Executive Summary—The development organization at Rosetta Stone builds
adapting the CI product to match their the widely popular language-learning consumer software. They recently
existing work processes and business outgrew their open-source continuous integration (CI) solution and needed a
requirements.
commercial-grade product to better manage software development in a
fast-paced and demanding environment. Using Cruise for CI has enabled the
Multi-platform builds development group to adopt an easy and reliable process to build and deploy
With Cruise, Rosetta Stone can now a complex product like Rosetta Stone across multiple platforms.
more easily execute multi-platform
builds because the product seamlessly
shares information across di erent
servers using Cruise Agents. The Customer
The leading language-learning software in the world, Rosetta Stone® has helped
Reliability and High millions of people in 150 countries learn a new language using an immersion
Usability environment rather than translation and memorization. Rosetta Stone provides
both personal and enterprise versions of their software, and is used by Fortune
Unlike an open-source tool, Cruise 500 companies, government agencies, community organizations, and schools
scales to meet the needs of a complex and universities. Founded in 1982, Rosetta Stone’s executive o ces are located in
development project that includes a Arlington, VA.
complex array of dependencies.
For more information about
The Challenge
The Rosetta Stone product development group, including teams in locations
Cruise or to request a demo, throughout Virginia, rst adopted Agile in June 2005. Well versed in the practice of
please contact: continuous integration (CI), the group had originally supported CI using a mix of
open-source tools including CruiseControl. With the commercial success of
EMAIL: studios@thoughtworks.com Rosetta Stone, the group’s workload has signi cantly expanded over the past four
years. Today there are seven development teams, each creating di erent
CALL: components of the Rosetta Stone product.
+1-312-543-2599 | North America As often happens, these teams have become siloed, working with seven tracks
and seven code repositories. And, all seven teams are developing products for the
+91-80-4064-9703 | Rest of the world PC, Macintosh and Linux platforms. While the group is working to implement
process changes to improve collaboration, they needed a commercial-grade CI
system that was exible enough to work across their existing silos.
In addition to their need for exibility, using an open-source tool such as Cruise
Control revealed limitations in executing multi-platform builds. Developers had to
work on one machine at a time. This required them to spend additional time and
e ort to manually link CruiseControl instances, so that their product could “chain”
build on multiple platforms.
Copyright c 2009 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved. www.thoughtworks-studios.com

2. CASE STUDY
The teams also realized their heavy workload and demanding
development schedule required better overall reliability from a CI
solution than an open-source product could provide. Instead, they
needed an enterprise-grade CI system that could ensure both high Rosetta Stone is an Agile/Scrum shop, and Cruise gives us a
reliability and technical support to manage the high volume of CI
required of large, integrated projects. reliable and dependable continual integration environment,
which is crucial to successful sprints. Using Cruise allows us to
spend less time on each sprint managing our builds and
The Solution releases, and more time working on our backlog. As a result,
Four teams were the rst to migrate from an open source CI system
to Cruise, a commercial-grade CI and release managment tool at the end of each sprint, we have a shippable product. As our
from ThoughtWorks Studios, for their continuous integration development group continues to grow, Cruise will enable us
needs. The components group builds library pieces to distribute
to get new Scrum teams o to a quick start, bringing our new
internally to other teams. The enterprise team develops the
Rosetta Stone manager application used by large groups. The products to market faster.
social media team creates web-based end-user applications, while
the applications team develops the core Rosetta Stone language
software product. Rob Vance, Vice President
Easier Multi-platform Builds. Cruise provides a zero- Rosetta Stone
con guration build grid, a feature that was important to the
Rosetta Stone team because it allowed the teams to more easily
and quickly execute multi-platform builds.
With Cruise, individual servers do not require any con guration.
Instead, Cruise Agents are installed on each machine. They are
assigned jobs by the Cruise Server and con gure automatically, By using Cruise for CI, the teams now have a more simplistic but
obtaining the source code or artifact for the required job. With reliable method to execute multiple-platform builds. Instead of
more agents running simultaneously, work is completed more having three separate instances of CruiseControl on each machine,
quickly which shortens the feedback loop in the development Cruise easily runs across multiple servers using organized
process. work ows.
This view in Cruise lists the Agents
available to the Cruise Server to execute
jobs. It also shows the corresponding
resources associated with each Agent.
Administrators can approve Agents and
specify Agent resources from this tab.
Rosetta Stone relies on Cruise Agents to
more easily conduct multi-platform
builds, which helps them to more quickly
develop their extensive product line on
several platforms.
Copyright c 2009 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved. www.thoughtworks-studios.com

3. CASE STUDY
This screen in Cruise shows the entire build
activity that has occurred during a speci c
stage in the pipeline over time. The user can
click the detail links to see all the information
for the stage or job. Various teams at Rosetta
Stone use Cruise di erently for their build
process. Some use pipelines to manage their
testing and deployment work ow, while
others use Cruise just for basic continuous
integration and reviewing daily builds. Cruise
provides the exibility to match how your
team works.
Cruise rolls up the execution results from across these servers, Reliability and Ease of Use. Using Cruise has provided the
providing a summary of which tests passed and which did not. Rosetta Stone teams an added bene t they could not nd with an
Because Cruise can run jobs in parallel, the development teams open-source tool: reliability. Each team executes a high volume of
can split the tests into multiple suites and implement them on CI on a daily basis, and although they use Cruise di erently, each
several servers simultaneously, saving a signi cant amount of time. depends on its robust architecture and high usability.
Flexible Use Among Teams. For the Rosetta Stone development Because Cruise is easy to install and to make operational, the teams
teams using Cruise, each has adapted the CI product to match can easily train existing members, add new people, and even show
their existing work processes. For example, one team is using their production development progression in Cruise to a non-
Cruise “by the books” utilizing pipelines to manage their testing technical audience.
and deployment work ow. These teams maintain numerous
projects and build interdependent code.
With Cruise, they can specify that a framework change should The Results
trigger dependent components to be built and have each By using Cruise, the Rosetta Stone development teams now have
integration veri ed by an automated build to detect errors. This a strong yet exible CI system that easily manages their heavy
process reduces integration problems and the team can develop development workload across multiple platforms.
cohesive software more quickly. The teams have achieved increased reliability in their product
Another team relies on Cruise for basic CI and reviewing daily development process and product quality, which is important
builds. They have their con guration management written in Ant, when governments and organizations across the world rely upon
and they execute work manually even though Cruise could do it their software. With each team working with Cruise in a manner
automatically. that best suits their needs, the group has made a seamless
transition from an open source tool to a commercial-grade
Instead of relying on automated builds, they build and tag artifacts
solution.
by hand, which is their preference due to that team’s particular
business requirements. The inherent exibility of Cruise allows
each team to implement and use the product in whatever way
best serves their needs.
Copyright c 2009 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved. www.thoughtworks-studios.com

4. CASE STUDY
About ThoughtWorks Studios
ThoughtWorks Studios is a global leader in Agile software development tools, and its products can be found in development
organizations seeking sustainable Agile adoption. The company’s Adaptive Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
solution provides a platform for managing all aspects of software development, from requirements de nition and project
TM
management to test automation, quality assurance, and release management. Adaptive ALM consists of the integration of
three products: Mingle (project management), Twist (test automation) and Cruise (release management). Each tool is
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available as part of a complete lifecycle solution or as a stand-alone product. Backed by more than 16 years of experience in
Agile delivery, ThoughtWorks Studios is the product division of the ThoughtWorks, Inc., the pioneering leader in Agile
development. ThoughtWorks Studios has 200 customers in more than 20 countries, including 3M, Honeywell, BBC, eBay,
Barclays, Vodafone, McGraw-Hill and Rackspace. The company headquarters is co-located in San Francisco and Bangalore,
with o ces in London and select cities in Europe, Asia and Australia.
For more information, visit www.thoughtworks-studios.com
mingle Mingle, an Agile management and collaboration tool,
R
provides a common workspace for all team members and an
automated system of record for all projects. Mingle can adapt
any existing work ow process and easily manages daily
Agile Project Management development activities. O ering true-to-life visibility into the
entire development process for all stakeholders, Mingle helps
development teams become more open and collaborative.
twist
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Twist, an automated testing solution, provides English-like
constructs, making the testing process more productive for
all team members. As applications grow in complexity, Twist
helps to more easily maintain complex test suites. These
Test Automation suites keep pace with application development and are held
as long-living assets.
cruise
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Cruise provides both continuous integration and release
management and can drive development and IT operations to
collectively plan continuous product releases. Cruise o ers
deployment pipelines and a zero-con guration build grid,
Release Management
which simplify the release management process. Unlike open-
source tools, Cruise scales to meet the needs of a complex
development project with numerous dependencies.
Copyright c 2009 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved. www.thoughtworks-studios.com