Thursday, December 15, 2011

How To Configure Rules

Is there a little too much shame in your office? Distracting alert dialogs? Blaring sirens bothering co-workers?

Configuring Rules

The fastest way to change the default settings across all projects is to right click anywhere in the white space and navigate the menu:


Following the screenshot above and clicking on "1 Second" will toggle the setting, thus disabling the chirp-on-check-in feature.

Configuring Per Build or Per Person

If you want to configure settings for only a specific project, or an individual on a specific project, you can click on the project and navigate the menu the same way:


Following the screenshot above will decrease the amount of time that the lights flash whenever "Lee" breaks the build for the first time on "Project 1" (perhaps as build manager he breaks it frequently).

Fine Tuning

Finally if you want more control of the rules you can check the "Configure Rules" button on the main page. This will take you to the Configure Rules screen where you can double click on a rule to edit and fine tune your settings:



Summary

Shaming build breakers doesn't have to annoy co-workers. Hopefully now you are able to accomplish one without the other ... or more effectively accomplish both.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Released 1.2.0

Summary of New Features
  • Maintains build history
  • Tracks user reputation
  • Graphs recent build durations
  • Simple per-project statistics
  • Turn off or reset reputation from settings menu
Bug fixes

  • Exception on adding Jenkins Jobs when Brackets "()" are part of the name (#2)
New Feature: Maintains build history

The software now maintains a history of check-ins for reporting purposes. At present it will miss anything that occurs when it's not running. In other words if you go on vacation for a week your stats will be different than your co-workers. We're working on a fix for this, but let us know if you think this is a big deal or not.

New Feature: Reputation


The goal of reputation is to add an element of good-natured competition and fun to your project while simultaneously trying to decrease the amount of time wasted resolving source control conflicts, fixing broken builds, and/or waiting on broken builds.

The idea is each person receives one point for each check-in, and loses four points for each broken build. This should do two things:

1. Encourage smaller more frequent check-ins, which will minimize check-in conflicts between team-members; and
2. Encourage team-members to run tests prior to check-in to decrease chances of breaking the build.

We intend to add more sophistication to the algorithm in a future release (e.g. incorporate code-coverage), but we would love to hear any feedback on what we have now.

If you really don't like the idea of reputation you can turn it off in settings.

New Feature: Build History


The chart on the right shows build durations for the last eight builds. A blue bar indicates a successful build. A red bar indicates a failed build. The Y axis shows duration in minutes. The X axis goes from oldest to newest. Click on a build on the left to show the chart on the right, click off a chart to go back to the user/reputation view (unless you've turned it off).

Summary

We're proud of the latest updates and we hope you'll like them. Please don't hesitate to give us feedback on twitter @SirenOfShame or via e-mail: "support" at our domain name.