AnthillPro Interview Questions and Answers

For those individuals planning for a career on AnthillPro software, Wisdomjobs is the right place to get all relevant information and updates. AnthillPro being the foremost integration servers that codes and tests software projects while quality being maintained. There are plenty of AnthillPro jobs for developers with good experience across locations both in and out of India in different companies. Is you are on a job hunt, things turn to be more annoying if you’re not aware of what to prepare, where to prepare and how to apply for any job. Hence, make sure to visit AnthillPro job interview questions and answers page on our job portal and prepare well for a sure win in the interview for a fruitful career of you dream.

1. What Is Anthillpro?

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It is classified as a software tool which helps in build and release management phase within a project. With the use of AnthillPro, it completely automates the process of code building into projects and also verifies whether the project quality is maintained by testing it.

2. How Is Anthillpro Useful?

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It is used as a software tool and helps the individuals to manage the following:

• Build Management
• Deployment Management
• Dependency Management
• Tool integration and data aggregation
• Process Automation

3. Explain About Codestation?

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Usually, a complex project depends upon a number of sub-projects, sub-libraries and forms a complete project. It is the same case with a simple project, even a simple project uses multiple sub-libraries or more. So it is important for every individual to make sure all are taken care of and thus the software tool AnthillPro came up with a built-in dependency management functionality which is nothing but Codestation.

4. So Anthillpro Needs A Third Party Dependency Management System?

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No, AnthillPro comes within an inbuilt dependency management system which is called as Codestation. The dependency management is actually done using the AnthillPro UI.

5. What Are The Three Types Of Projects In Anthillpro?

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The three types of projects in AnthillPro are listed below:

• Life cycle based projects
• Codestation projects
• Operational ( Nonlife cycle based) projects

6. Define Life Cycle Based Projects?

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A life cycle based project will give more clear information about the build and release cycle of a particular project. For example, a typical web application will have the UI layer, database, and the logic tier. Within AnthillPro all these three parts are executed and build using three projects. Thus every build has its own identification and has a unique set of an identifier.

The following steps are taken into consideration for Lifecycle based projects:

• Life cycle model
• Environments
• Build and workflow process

7. Briefly, Explain What Is A Job?

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A job is nothing but a set of instructions or steps/process of getting something executed in an organized manner. This can be specific to build, deployment or it can be completely a business need.

8. What Is A Trigger?

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A trigger is defined as an automatic mechanism which ignites or starts a specific workflow. Usually, this is predefined so that it does it job when it needs to.

9. Can A Single Workflow Be Used For Multiple Projects In Anthill Pro?

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Well, a single workflow can be used for multiple projects. For this to happen, one has to make sure and use the same workflow process and use it for multiple projects by including them in the Workflow library.Usually, they are added at the point of the project workflow creation process.

10. What Is Source Configuration?

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A source configuration is very important in build and release cycle management system. Usually, it is useful to identify the source code for a particular project. Also, it helps the system to understand when it comes to retrieving a previous version of the project code. This is configured for every project at the time of the executing the source control.

11. At What Level, The Dependencies Within The Projects Are Described In Anthillpro?

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Usually, the dependencies within the projects are described at the workflow level in Anthill Pro.

12. What Does A Life Cycle Model Consist Of?

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A life cycle model consists of the following:

• Cleanup Policy
• Stamp style group
• Artifact set
• Status Group

13. Within Anthillpro, Can We Use Any Third Party Plugins?

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Yes, with the AnthillPro plugin system, one can write a customized code and can develop plugins which will help them to integrate with third-party tools.  For example, homegrown testing, CRM, analytics etc.

14. What Is The Use Of Job Wizard In Anthill Pro?

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With the use of Anthill pro Job wizard, an individual will be able to successfully create the steps for the job to execute successfully. It will ensure that the build job will be configured successfully without any failures.

15. What Are The Two Different Types Of Workflows In Anthill Pro?

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There are basically two types of workflows in Anthill Pro. i.e.

• Origination workflow
• Non-origination workflow

16. What Is Originating Workflow In Detail?

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The originating workflows use life cycle models, build lives, source configurations and dependency information. Within this workflow, the user will have an option to opt for only one target environment.

17. What Is Non-originating Workflow In Detail?

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The non-originating workflows actually executed with the help of existing build life (i.e. deployments). The main difference between the origination workflow and non-originating workflow is that originating workflow will be able to select only environment, while non-originating workflows will have an option to select n number of target environments.

18. What Is Workflow Definition?

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A workflow definition actually describes the sequence of the jobs that are configured to be executed. This sequence is configurable and this is nothing but workflow definition. It usually talks about the sequence or the order of the jobs that are aligned.

19. Explain What Exactly Is Defined In Build Life?

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A build life actually talks about the three important aspects of the build or the deployment.

They are as follows:

• What has occurred during the build
• What process was performed that has generated the artifacts
• Where the build artifacts end up

20. Within Anthill Pro, How Deployments And Releases Are Treated?

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Most of the time deployments and releases are treated the same manner and usually follow the same process to test the Genuity. Most of the time it is handled by a secondary workflow which does the overnight checks. All this information is available for Build life page on Anthill Pro dashboard.

21. What Are The Different Approaches For Scheduling An Independent Method In Anthill Pro?

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They are three different kinds of approaches for scheduling:

• Independent scheduling
• Push scheduling
• Pull scheduling

22. What Is Independent Scheduling?

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Within this type of approach, the related projects don’t have to know each other in detail. A dependent project will be executed and it gathers all the dependencies from the source control and does the job.

23. What Is Push Scheduling?

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A push scheduling is also known as a bottom-up model. If the originating workflow is successfully built then the workflows associated with the process are automatically built as well. It is simply because any changes that are done to the dependency result in the changes to the dependent as well.

24. What Is Pull Scheduling?

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This is completely opposite to that of push schedule. In pull schedule, whenever a dependency build is executed then the dependents are not built automatically. This is a major difference. Also, the builds will be executed as per their own schedules.

25. What Is The Clean Up Policy?

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A clean policy defines the process when to delete a certain information from the old build lives and also all the other associated tasks within the project.

26. What Is Stamp Style Group?

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A stamp style group actually creates common names for the stamp types

27. State Some Of The Status Groups In Anthill Pro?

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A status group is nothing but a set of names for statues.

Some of them are:

• Failed
• Successful
• Deployed to Test
• Deployed to production
• Testing

28. The Majority Of The Projects Within Anthillpro Are Life Cycle Based Or Not?

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Yes, the majority of the projects that are set up under Anthillpro are life cycle based only.

29. While Build Scheduling, Dependency Relationships Are Used?

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Yes, dependency relationships are used while configuring build schedules.

30. In Anthillpro Can You Lock Down An Artifact To A Specific Version?

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Yes, an artifact can be locked down to a specific version within Anthill Pro.

31. What is the difference between anthillpro and urbancode deploy?

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AnthillPro is a build pipeline tool. It’s a great continuous integration tool, that has the concept of a “Build Life” that tracks your build’s progress through subsequent environments/stages.

UrbanCode Deploy is application deployment automation. It isn’t designed to do builds. Rather it integrates with a range of build tools and artifact repositories to get the stuff to deploy. The application scoping is really key though.

Where AnthillPro assumes that each build project has its own release pipeline, UrbanCode Deploy optimizes for changing applications that test and deploy lots of builds (and other stuff) together.

So if you have an application with two front-ends, 10 web services and two databases, AnthillPro would have 14 pipelines and UrbanCode Deploy would have a single pipeline tracking the versions of all those things that are deployed.

Other key deployment enhancements in UCD: Anthillpro Vs UDeploy

Inventory: Detailed understanding of what is where at environment and target levels (Anthill basically just tracks environment)

Incremental Deployments: As a build pipeline tool, AnthillPro considers the most recently deployed version to be the state of an environment.

That doesn’t account well for things that are deployed incrementally (databases, patches, content, etc). UCD treats incremental deployments as first-class citizens.

More Deployment Integrations: While AnthillPro has some integrations with middleware for deployments, UCD has dozens more,

discovery capabilities and integrations tend to be more full-featured.

More scalable config: With component templates and a new security model, UCD does a nicer job of reusing configuration.

More scalable architecture: While AnthillPro scales pretty well, we wanted to hit that next order of magnitude with UCD. So it supports a nice clustering model for the central servers, providing additionally scalability and high availability.

Versioned Configuration: While AnthillPro does a good job of logging configuration updates, UCD also versions the configuration providing better visibility (you know what version of config was used for any deployment)

easy comparison of before / after values, and easy restore of old deployment processes.

Updated Process Designer & Workflow Engine: A new workflow engine provides better flexibility and performance. It is shared with UC Build. The process designer makes it easy to define processes with interesting conditional flows and parallelism as opposed to AnthillPro’s mostly linear flow through jobs and parallelism only available at higher levels.

32. Difference between Anthillpro Vs Jenkins?

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1) Does all the task that is possible to do in AntHillPro will be done in Jenkins.

Yes, most of things are possible, which are commonly used.

2) Possible dollar cost savings for Using Jenkins instead of AntHillPro.

Jenkins is free, AHP will cost some $.

3) All our projects are in ant, want to migrate it to maven, does Jenkins support that.

Jenkins supports Ant, Maven, Shell Script, Windows batch commands.

33. What are Environments in AnthillPro?

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An environment is a partition grid of agents that is specific for different stages of a project Life-Cycle (QA, PROD, etc.). Each environment may also be configured to a specific technology (Java, .NET, etc.).

34.How To run Grunt on Anthill Pro?

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Currently, we don’t have a specific Grunt plugin available, this can be achieved by using the Grunt CLI via a Shell Builder step.

35. Is there a way to provide global workflow properties of any type (scripted, text etc…) in Anthillpro or UrbanCode?

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Urbancode Build can achieve this by using Process Templates and having the property defined on the template, rather than the process itself (processes are similar to workflows in AnthillPro). However, AnthillPro does not have this feature.

The only way other than manually creating these properties would be to write a script to automatically create/manipulate the necessary properties on certain workflows that match a criteria (e.g. the name matches a pattern or the workflow belongs to a certain project).

36. AnthillPro TFS Build Plugin Cannot find tftoolExecutable? Where do I get the tftool2012.exe?

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In should be sitting in the bin directory of your agent install.

37. Is it possible to add a new BuildLifeStatus to a BuildLife from within a groovy script?

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From a BuildLife, you can walk your way to the Statuses. For instance if you know you have a status named “Passed Tests” you could do something like this:

The status group belongs to the lifecycle model.

The origin isn’t something I’m terribly familiar with, but it looks like you could do something like this:

38. How to use repository triggers in anthillpro for Rational clearcase for Continuous integration?

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Both the individual workflow triggers (Workflow -> Trigger) and the global repository triggers (System -> Repository -> (individual repo) -> Trigger) have trigger urls to which you send a GET request.

It’s that simple. Use wget or curl,

IE: wget -O /dev/null –quiet –no-check-certificate –post-data=”code=$CODE” “$TRIGGER_URL”

The global repository triggers (System -> Repository -> (individual repo) -> Trigger) typically give you an easily customized template for using wget or curl in a hook on your SCM system.

These triggers require you to pass several query parameters to indicate which workflow you want to trigger when a GET request is sent to the url, since all workflows using this repository could potentially be triggered.

39. Explain Dependency and artifact management in AnthillPro?

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Complex projects can depend on dozens of subprojects, and even simple projects might use half a dozen libraries or more. To deal with these complexities, AnthillPro has a built-in dependency and artifact management system called Codestation.

40. Explain Tool integration and data aggregation in AnthillPro?

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AnthillPro integrates with leading tools used throughout the application lifecycle.  Most integrations go beyond a simple command-line integration to include data aggregation (e.g., parsing of the output, knowledge of the tool options, etc.).

41. What is Process automation in AnthillPro?

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As you start building projects and configure AnthillPro with your SCM, testing, issue tracking tools and more, it becomes clear how all of the parts fit together to automate your processes:

AnthillPro en-forces automation throughout the entire application life-cycle, which in turn makes managing your projects easier.

For more advanced users, AnthillPro offers host of advanced authoring features that enable you to add additional automation to your AnthillPro processes: Including the creation of automated operations or processes, full access to the API (see Tools > Anthill Development Tools) and the ability to write your own Plugin.

42. AnthillPro supports which databases?

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AnthillPro supports the following databases to store information:

• Oracle
• MySQL with InnoDB storage
• Microsoft SQL Server
• DB2
• PostgreSQL

43. What are the components of AnthillPro?

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The components of AnthillPro are:

• Workflow Definition
• Environment
• Notification Scheme
• Lockable Resource
• Properties
• Triggers
• Source Configuration
• Stamp Mapping
• Dependencies
• Artifacts

44. How many types of projects are there in Anthillpro?

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In AnthillPro, there are three project types: Life-Cycle Based, Codestation Projects, and Operational (Non-Life-Cycle Based) Projects.

45. What is Life-Cycle Based Projects?

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Life-Cycle Based projects are used to run builds, deployments, etc.

46. What is Operational (Non-Life-Cycle Based) Projects?

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Operational Projects are used for administrative, operational, and system maintenance.

47. What is Codestation in AnthillPro?

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AnthillPro has a built-in dependency and artifact management system called Codestation.

Codestation enables you to track and visualize dependencies across libraries and subprojects based on version numbers or release statuses that you control.

Because Codestation is part of AnthillPro, there is no need for a

third-party management system — dependency management is performed through the AnthillPro UI. (If you don’t use AnthillPro for dependency management, you can still use it for build and deployment management, as well as process automation.)

Codestation is also used to manage the artifacts generated by every build. Through the UI, you can configure which files are available as a dependency to other projects, which files should be included in a deployment, as

well as the files you want sent to the testing lab. See Dependency Management for more.

48. Explain Deployment management in AnthillPro?

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AnthillPro’s deployment management features allow you to use the same deployment scripts across all your environments, so you can automate your deployment processes while enforcing standards throughout your organization.

AnthillPro’s binary promotion model and artifact repository ensure that you are using the exact same binaries from environment to environment. And to account for environmental differences, AnthillPro allows you to set job-iteration, environment-specific properties, etc.