Minions is a build automation toolkit, similar to rake, Paver, et. al. Like those tools, it can be used for a wide variety of software automation tasks. However, with Minions, your tasks (minions) are far more loosely coupled to each other. This allows you to unit test - not just integration test - your build. Minions work in parallel, gaining large speed advantages when you are I/O bound. Finally, independent minions makes it easy to pull out a task or two, toss it in a file, and share it with other projects - or even release it as a Minion plugin.