--- title: "Avoid XML Facing Build Tools" url: "https://pipelinedriven.org/article/2014/3/2/avoid-xml-facing-build-tools.md" canonical: "https://pipelinedriven.org/article/2014/3/2/avoid-xml-facing-build-tools" published: "2014-03-02T21:25:55.049000+00:00" updated: "2014-03-02T21:26:07.762000+00:00" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Having your build scripts in XML is one of the worst things you can do for maintainability and readability. Treat your build scripts like you treat your…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Avoid XML Facing Build Tools 2 March 2014 · 1 min read · Roy Osherove Having your build scripts in XML is one of the worst things you can do for maintainability and readability. Treat your build scripts like you treat your source code (or, how developers **should** treat their source code) – with respect for readability and maintainability, not just for performance. To that end, XML is a bad candidate to have. If you have any more than 15 or 20 lines of xml in a build document: - It is hard to tell where things start, and what they depend on - It is hard to debug the build - It is hard to add or change things in the build logic - XML case sensitivity sucks - Creating, Adding and using  custom actions is a chore To avoid XML, you can start using some of the many build tools out there that are either visual, or support a domain specific language for builds that is more readable, maintainable or debuggable than XML: - [Rake](http://rake.rubyforge.org/) – Ruby Based DSL (Domain Specific Language) for builds, that is very robust and quite readable - [FinalBuilder](http://www.finalbuilder.com/) and [VisualBuild](http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/) are two visual build scripting tools that give great readability into your build script --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/