NICOS System of Nightly Builds for Distributed Development

NICOS, NIghtly COntrol System, is a flexible tool for coordination of software development in large-scale projects. It manages the multi-platform nightly builds based on the recent versions of software packages, tries to compensate for technical failures, tests the newly built software, identifies possible problems, and makes results immediately available to developers spread over different institutions and countries. The NICOS nightly build services ensure that new software submissions are consistent and provide expected results. The NICOS tool was developed to coordinate the efforts of more than 100 developers from 34 countries for the ATLAS project at CERN and can be easily adapted for other large software projects.