I would think that scripted code checkout from CVS followed by compile and running the test suite was pretty usual. Given that this is only a few lines of shell or Perl why would you NOT automate it every night?

I hate doing the same stuff over and will typically spend 2-3 x as long to script it so I never have to do it over ever again. Mostly you win, sometimes you lose.....

In our case it took a long time to create the automation but we recovered the cost (and time) very quickly, within days actually. My advice on this is to track how long is currently takes you now to do everything, that way you can show the benefit in $$$ to management. Good for those reviews and CYA. :-)

Did you build your own tools? What tools are readily available?

I would think that scripted code checkout from CVS followed by compile and running the test suite was pretty usual

Oh how I wish that were true.... for a start you're assuming that everybody actually has some kind of source control (gosh - I love consulting :-)

I've built one of these, and it was a lot of fun.

The interesting thing was, to me, how this automation script blossomed over time into what now stands as a utility very much like ant and nant. To give you an idea of how far I went, here is the list of "modules" that I could batch together and configure for the many different flavours of "build" I had on my plate at the time:

I controlled builds by composing INI files (guess which platform I was on ;-), and I had a simple GUI I used to check/uncheck different steps in each. I was about to launch into writing a miniature scripting language, or perhaps just a mechanism for passing state information between steps, when I realised that I was reinventing the wheel in a major way and it was time to stop. Soon after, I changed jobs and the need for such a tool diminished.

We use multiple perl scripts to do the job: one to build the C++ code, one to run the C++ white box regression tests, one (Test::Harness prove) to run the Perl white box regression tests, another to run the black box regression tests, and so on. Writing each script as a stand-alone tool has proved useful because developers can use them standalone, plus the same tool can be called from the high level nightly smoker script.

We don't do continuous builds. We do complete builds and regression tests nightly. This is mainly because we support a dozen or so different platforms from a single source code base. We use rsh to control running the nightly smoker across the many build and test machines.