Introducing My CI: Turn a Smart Phone Into a Siren of Shame

Today we're proud to release a new, free, service called My CI and in conjunction Siren of Shame 2.1.1 (see also our official 2.1.1 release nodes).

Why?

Continuous integration can be awesome.  It can significantly improve quality on projects.  But incorporating it into daily life for the entire team can be hard.  It ultimately only works if everyone on a team is both aware of the state of the build, and is actively engaged in fixing it when it breaks.

We built My CI to help team leads achieve both ends: generate awareness, while encouraging everyone to fix broken builds; hopefully while making things a little more fun along the way.

What Is It?

My CI is a service that you turn on from our desktop software (2.1.1 or later) to enable some new features. First, it allows anyone to turn a smart phone or tablet into a mini Siren of Shame.  Second, it enables e-mail build notifications with fun user stats and updates about new teammates' achievements.  Finally, it turns on a customized web page we host on our website that displays your team's real time build status, build history, and team member stats like reputation, achievements, CSB, and FSB.

We have a pretty new webpage on our site to describe My CI at a high level here, but read on if you're interested in details.

Turn On My CI

Enabling My CI is easy.  After you pick up the Siren of Shame 2.1.1 desktop software, create an account, open up the SoS Online settings page and turn on My CI like this:

Or, if you use Travis to monitor a Github project you can add the account directly from the My CI page and we'll monitor it for you.  The only downside is we do not yet support achievements and reputation for projects monitored from our server.

Your My CI Page

Once you've enabled My CI you can log onto http://sirenofshame.com/myci and you should see something like the following:

Your builds are on the left with most recent check-in comments, author, and build status.

Notice the team members listed on the right with their baseball card stats including Consecutive Successful Builds (CSB), Fail %, # of Times Fixed Someone else's Build (FSB), Total Builds (T), Reputation, and achievement counts.

We designed this view to be something you could throw up on a projector or put on a dedicated monitor from a machine that isn't running the desktop software.  We hope your team will find the baseball card stats to be motivating and add an element of friendly competition.

If you click on a user you can view individual achievements earned:

If you click on a build from the My CI page you can view build history:

Email Notifications

Typically an e-mail from a build server is bad news.  Wouldn't it be nice if your build failed e-mails contained a silver lining?

Or wouldn't it be nice to occasionally pass on good news to your teammates?

Mobile Sirens of Shame

We saved the best for last.  We now have apps for just about every smartphone and tablet.  We have apps for

• Android
• iPhone and iPad
• Windows 8 tablets
• Windows Phone 7 and 8

Push Notifications

Now when the build breaks we send push notifications to your device(s).  You'll get a modal dialog that pops up with who broke the build and their check-in comments.  In Android you'll get build updates to your notification area.  In Windows 8 and Windows Phone you'll get live tile updates with recent check-in details.

Badges

In iPhone, Windows Phone and Win8 if any of the builds your monitor are broken we'll throw a badge on the Siren of Shame icon to show a count of broken builds without even needing to open the app.

Build Status, Leaders, News

When you open the app you can see all of your builds.  In Android it looks like this.

You can drill down to view recent check-ins.

We also show news from the Siren of Shame leader board like this in iOS:

Or the leaders from the Siren of Shame leaderboard like this in Windows Phone.

Summary
We hope you enjoy this new service.  We've got some big plans for it in the works, so stay tuned in here, on Facebook, or on twitter.  And as always please feel free to add comments we'd love to hear your feedback.