There are many roles in a typical Information Technology organization and there are four that can benefit from the adoption of Hudson: the project manager, the software developer, the tester, and the application server administrator. Depending on the size of the IT organization, these roles may span multiple departments or a single person may have more than one role. If the IT organization is large, with these roles functioning in different departments, Hudson can be the tool that brings these teams together to work toward the common goal of creating great software.
Hudson provides the project manager with a dashboard overview of the project(s) they are responsible for. They can see the build status and history, as well as view test reports and test coverage, giving them the confidence that the project is healthy and moving forward.
Getting quick feedback via the unit test reports and the build status that Hudson provides helps assure the software developer that they have not broken any existing code and that any features and/or bug fixes they are working on have not broken the build. Removing the burden of building the software for deployment allows the developer to focus on providing value to the customer by developing and improving software, instead of worrying about building and releasing the software.
The tester can benefit from using Hudson by automating some of the testing using the Selenium plugin and by viewing the test reports, which eliminates much of the mundane and repeatable part of testing. Having builds available early and often will also help the tester get a head start on developing tests and actually beginning some testing.
The application server administrator can benefit from using Hudson because continuously building and deploying the application will improve their confidence in the build process and reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises at the last minute. Hudson defines the build very clearly and this helps make the build repeatable and portable, which removes the requirement to manually build the application from the administrator.