Reading this post has left me wondering; are nightly builds ever better for a situation than continuous integration? The consensus of the answers seems to be pretty lopsided in favor of continuous integration, is that evangelism or is there really no reason to use nightly builds when continuous integration is an option?
In our organization, nightly builds and CI builds have two distinct purposes. The CI build is a 'latest code' build in which the unit tests are run against the last check in as you would expect. We also run several code metrics on the CI build.
For nightly builds, however, we only incorporate source code that has been through the peer review process and is deemed ready for testing.
This way, the nightly build always contains build that is 'feature ready' for testing, while the CI build contains features that while functional (to the extent that the unit tests pass) may not be ready to send the to the test group.
The test groups writes new CRs exclusively from one of the nightly builds as opposed to the CI build, although those are also available for informal exploratory type testing.
Yes, if you have a process you want attached to a build, but it is resource heavy. For example, on my team we run JTest during the nightly build. We can't run it during the day because: