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Why should I do Nightly Builds?
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You should do nightly builds to ensure that your codebase stays healthy. A side effect of doing nightly builds is that it forces the team to create and maintain a fully automated build script. This helps to ensure that your build process is documented and repeatable.
A daily build or nightly build is the practice of completing a software build of the latest version of a program, on a daily basis. This is so it can first be compiled to ensure that all required dependencies are present, and possibly tested to show no bugs have been introduced.
A nightly build is a neutral build that takes place automatically. These typically take place when no one is likely to be working in the office so that there are no changes to the source code during the build.
The stable releases are made every 6 weeks (with occasional point releases). Beta releases are the version that will appear in the next stable release. Nightly releases are made every night.
You should do nightly builds to ensure that your codebase stays healthy.
A side effect of doing nightly builds is that it forces the team to create and maintain a fully automated build script. This helps to ensure that your build process is documented and repeatable.
Automated builds are good at finding the following problems:
Doing this nightly ensures that you catch such problems within 24 hours of when they occur. That is preferable to finding all the problems 24 hours before you are supposed to deliver the software.
You should also, of course, have automated unit tests that are run for each nightly build.
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I've personally found continuous integration to be better than nightly builds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
I even use it on one man projects, it's amazing how fast you can expose issues and take care of them right there.
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