Thursday, May 30, 2013

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


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.

Monday, December 31, 2012

Reputation Algorithm Change

Happy New Year!

To celebrate we just changed the way we calculate reputation.  This will result in a reputation increase for 41 users immediately and will be much nicer going forward.

You used to gain one point for a successful build and lose four points for a failed build.

Sadly there were quite a few users in the negative.  The negative numbers appeared to occur due to high concentrations of failed builds occurring infrequently.  In other words because someone was configuring the CI server.

So rather than adjust number of points for failure we opted to disallow going negative.  Thus if you're doing configuration you can at least have a lower bound.

We recalculated everyone's reputation from the beginning of time.  For example if your reputation was -3 because:

1. You failed a build and lost 4 points = Reputation -4
2. Then you passed a build and gained 1 = Reputation -3

Then effective immediately your reputation will change to 1.  In other words the with the new algorithm it should have been:

1. You failed a build and stayed at zero because you can't go negative = Reputation 0
2. Then you passed a build and gained 1 = Reputaiton 1

Hopefully this will produce a slightly less shameful 2013.  Happy New Year!

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Released 2.0.3

Features

  • Can now sort columns in full screen mode by clicking on the column names (Issue #26)
  • Full screen mode displays on the monitor the app was last in (Issue #19)
  • Can hide users by right-clicking on them (and 'show all' from the menu to unhide)

Bug Fixes

  • Travis wasn't detecting server unavailable correctly
  • An error with one build in Hudson/Jenkins was shutting everything down, errors are now isolated
  • There is now more logging for when build statuses change to help diagnose issues some users are experiencing (Issue #40)
  • Attempted to fix the anonymously submitted "Cannot access a disposed object" bug (again)
  • Hudson/Jenkins wasn't always finding the author of a commit correctly

Acknowledgements

Big shout out to @mightymuke who contributed almost all of the features and bug fixes in this release.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Released 2.0.2

A very boring release.

Bugs fixed


  • SoS now qualifies any build definitions that share a name



  • Added tool tips to the funnel icon in view user and view build pages

  • Renaming a user now immediately renames them on build and user tiles
  • The user display name edit text box is no longer too "sticky"
  • The user image picker is no longer too "sticky"
  • Screensaver is now disabled in full-screen mode
  • Main page elements now line up correctly

Misc

Big thanks to everyone that reported bugs in 2.0, particularly @MightyMuke, @EricHoch, and @DamianEdwards

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Siren of Shame 2.0

For our first major release we've got some great new stuff:

New Features

  • Complete UI overhaul 
  • News feeds
  • User stats
  • Getting started wizard
  • View build page
  • View user page
  • SoS Online integration
  • Moved to GitHub


Complete UI Overhaul


We're banking on attractiveness bias.  Hopefully the app is now so pretty that you won't care that it barely works.



"Content first" was our primary objective.  You should also notice:

  • Pretty animations draw your attention to new content
  • Advanced options don't take up prime real estate
  • Users have custom pictures so you can more quickly identify who's done what (they will be customizable in a future release) 
  • The app has more consistency in icons and fonts
For instance we hid the action bar at the top and redid all the icons (and no, it is not nor was it ever a ribbon):


In short we did like 5 minutes of research on design best practices and pretended we knew what we were doing.

News Feed

With the old app you could go out to lunch and your teammates could break the build like 15 times while adding insulting check-in comments, then make a legit check-in seconds before you get back and you'd never know.  No more:



User stats


This may be the coolest feature even if you aren't a baseball fan or an accountant:


Clockwise from top:
  • [big number]: Reputation
  • [yellow disk]: Achievements
  • F: Fail percentage
  • CSB: Consecutive Successful Builds
  • T: Total Builds
  • FSB: # of times Fixed Someone else's Build

Getting started wizard
You're probably an existing user who could care less, but getting started is now far more obvious:



View build page
If you find yourself caring 99% about one build -- yet somewhat wanting to watch others in order to humiliate build breakers from other projects -- then you'll love this feature.  Click the title of a build to get:


  • The selected build always stays on top
  • News gets filtered to just the current build
  • Other projects are still visible, but few details
  • You get a pretty chart of the last 8 build times (numbers in minutes, newest on right)

View User Page

Click a user to get:


From here you can
  • View news, filtered to just the current user
  • View achievements
  • Change a photo
  • Edit a display name

SoS Online Integration

Who isn't into public humiliation, right?  Or at least some heckling.  We now show all SoS Online content right there in the news feed.  If you want to shame someone just type in the textbox and hit enter.  And thanks to SignalR everything is instantaneous.


Moved to GitHub

We finally did it.  We'll keep task requests and releases on Google for now, but the code will love in GitHub at the following location:

https://github.com/AutomatedArchitecture/SirenOfShame

Bugs

We fixed some.  We introduced a ton.  When you find them please see How to Report Errors.

Major Refactoring

If you care to open the hood we're now slightly less embarrassed by what you'll find (particularly with the rules engine).

Summary

We've added lots of great new functionality which we hope will help you increase code quality while having a bit of fun.  Please post your feedback below in the comments, on twitter, on our issues list, on facebook, or heck on SoS Online.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

A Year of Shame

A year ago we figured we'd maybe sell a couple of these things.  But since September of 2011 we have averaged a sale of one and a half units per week.  That's 71 units to 61 Locations Worldwide.  We've shipped Siren of Shame units to thirteen countries.  We've had generous open source advocates buy us 44 beers!

Not too bad for a couple of guys working out of a basement in their spare time.  Thank you to everyone who has helped including friends, patient customers, and especially family.

And here's a cool map of locations we've shipped to:


View Siren of Shame Units Worldwide in a full screen map

Thursday, July 19, 2012

How To Reset Reputation

If you've got a negative reputation in SoS Online and were considering just creating a new account, but didn't want to lose your achievements, we now have a solution.


Go to your profile page.  Click Activity.  Click the new "Reset Reputation" link.  Your reputation will reset to zero and your achievements will remain.

The only down side is that the reputation reset will be visible in the leader board activity feed.