In May 2007 I participated in Santa Clara at an Agile training organized by Nortel. I heard then from Mishkin Berteig of other companies who are using extreme feedback for their continuous integration – a lava lamp that starts to bubble when the automated build fails. I thought at that time I should do something like that for my team, so I started to study…
In September 2007 I finally set up a lava lamp for the project I’m in.. I followed the instructions on Instructables site and, except for some small problems, I was able to successfully finish this small agile project. The lamp is working fine now and everybody got accustomed with it; now, when we have a Build failed and the lamp goes on, everybody starts asking who broke it and it gets fixed in no time.
However, currently the lamp behaves like that: it is on when a build is failed and off when all builds passed. This doesn’t say much of the current status of the build (maybe somebody fixed it and it is currently building).
The solution I’m thinking about is to create a circuit containing about 15 leds – 5 leds for each of the following colors: red, yellow and green – and insert them in a white-transparent globe.
The lava lamp would not be a lava lamp anymore, I know.. but it is still an extreme form of feedback. The behavior would change to this one:
- Red when one of the builds is failed (and the continuum integration engine doesn’t run for this specific build)
- Yellow if the build was broken previously but currently there is another build running (so somebody took care of the failed build)
- Green if all builds passed.
Unfortunately I don’t have much time left to finish the project. I would like it to look like this one here.
I’ll post again when I’ll finish the project (although I’m not sure when this will happen cause I’m preparing for the second SCEA exam ..).
