The Brockman surname is not common, but has spread to several countries around the world. The name can be a topism combining "wet/water" and "man". However, in Old English and in heraldry a "brock" is also a badger, and some have claimed it to mean "broker".

Brockman is an information radiator for monitoring Ant builds. It is useful for Agile software teams that practice continuous integration. Brockman consists of an Ant listener written in Java that outputs that status of your build in XML, a Freemarker template that specifies the format of the output XML file, and an AJAX front end that renders the XML file.