What does it mean when the Build status is partially succeeded

Madhu Pusarla

The status of the Build says "Build partially succeeded". Can someone clarify what it means?

Lavanya Gundamaraju

Short Answer - Partially successful means that the code compiled but something else after the compile step failed.

Long answer -

The build is a multi-step process. It includes getting the source from TFS, giving the build a number, labelling the code with the build number, compile, run checkstyle, findbugs or any code analysis tools, deploy the code, run post deployment tests etc. The out of the box build functionality only supports .net projects. CM customized TFS build to be able to use TFS for Java builds. We reuse the targets(jobs) exposed by Microsoft to apply Java specific build operations.

Now by default Microsoft marks the build as 'Successful' if each of the step above completes successfully. If any of the steps before compile fail - its a failure. If compile fails, its a failure. If compile passes and anything after that fails, its a Partially Successful build (irrespective of the build step). CM team customized that functionality. We capture the result of the custom task and change the build status to 'Failed' if the custom task failed. There are some cases out there where the custom task (specially if it is a tool that is integrated into the build) does not return the status correctly or the status is not captured correctly to overwrite the build status. Hence the 'Partially Successful' build status pops up.