Siren of Shame Review

Patrice Lamarche just wrote up a wonderful Siren of Shame review, both of the application and the device. His review covers how he combined it with continuous integration to increase software quality.

Following is a part of the review I translated as best as possible from the original French with the aid of Google Translate (I do not speak French ^LR).

The developers used to perform check-ins without necessarily getting latest. This occasionally resulted in code under source control that wouldn't compile, which would produce an unpleasant surprise for the next developer getting latest.

To solve this problem and be able to more quickly respond to similar issues we established a build server with [TFS] Team Build.

...

This resulted in some progress toward our goal of being more responsive to these issues, but I still had to educate the team to pay attention to the status of the build in TFS.

We achieved this goal thanks to the siren. Team members now want to avoid the siren and lights and so they think twice about what they are about to commit *before* they check-in. The siren represents a highly visible reminder of the state of the build server. Its lights and siren are almost no longer necessary: its mere presence is sufficient.

This represents another (small step) toward increased software quality and decreased stress for the team!

Check out the entire review as translated by Google here.