Modern software development is much more than writing code. There are a lot of auxiliary processes to build, test and package software that ensure it is usable by other people than the developers. Recently released as open source, SoftFab is a tool that ties together all these auxiliary processes and allows you to control and review them through a web interface.

SoftFab can be used for Continuous Integration, where short test cycles are kicked off whenever something is committed to a version control repository. But it can also be used to schedule longer test cycles or do ad-hoc tests when finding and fixing a bug. It is particularly suited for dealing with unique setups or hardware that require some processes to run in dedicated places.

In this talk I will demonstrate how you can model build and test execution and give some practical tips, so even if you don't plan to adopt SoftFab you will likely learn something useful.