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I'm looking for a 'term' that describes holistically the set of various software development tools/services that most developers use on a day to day basis. While each tool by itself has a specific purpose and can be described, is there a plural term when they are grouped together and running as a holistic service.

If a person said a server was a production test box, I'd expect it to be running the application that company are writing. If a person said box A is the office ware server, I'd know to expect email/communication related services.

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  • "Polymorphic" service? It responds differently to the same requests? Perhaps multi-use would be a better adjective.
    – Huperniketes
    Oct 13, 2010 at 17:37
  • Yeah, the "polymorphic" thing puzzles me. Perhaps what you mean is "holistic"?
    – Pete
    Jan 27, 2011 at 14:42
  • We put SVN, bugtracker (Redmine) etc. all on one machine. We call it - DevCentral. Some people also call it forge!
    – Dipan Mehta
    Jan 19, 2012 at 11:31

5 Answers 5

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I think that there is a mismatch between the question heading, and the actual question.

The heading refers to the actual machine that is running theses tools. I believe the common term for this is a 'Build Server'

But the actual question reads more like, what is the common name for the tools themselves, as a whole. And I believe here the most common term is a 'Tool Chain'

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I've been using the term "build environment" or "build server" which covers our:

  • SVN Server
  • Issue tracking
  • CCNet
  • Test case management
  • Development wiki
  • etc

It was the best term we could come up with at the time.

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  • SCM server (SCM stands for Software Configuration Management)
  • ALM server (ALM stands for Application Lifecycle Management). Actually, this one would be more appropriate for your stack of tools.
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  • +1 for ALM, this was the first thing that came to my mind
    – MattDavey
    Aug 23, 2012 at 18:17
  • If it wasn't here that's what I was going to say. All of that would be grouped under the umbrella of ALM.
    – Michael Brown
    Mar 8, 2013 at 21:14
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Build server is probably as good a name as any, even though you'd be doing more than just running your build on it.

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Personally I use "Developer Toolchain". The term originally meant text editor + compiler + linker, but I think bug tracking, version control and others are equally essential to software development these days, so they can be included in the definition.

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