Build Notifications in Agile Environments
Date
2008-01-14
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Abstract
In an agile software development environment, developers write code
that should work together to fulfill the wishes of the customer. Continuous
integration (CI) ensures that code from different individuals integrates
properly. CI compiles the entire codebase, deploys and tests it with each
change. CI alerts developers of any problems as errors can be fixed more
easily if caught earlier in the process. This paper compares the
effectiveness of different types of mechanisms for notifying developers to a
successful or unsuccessful build. Two different quantitative and qualitative
user studies were performed testing the effectiveness of three types of
notification devices one virtual e-mail based mechanism, one using ambient
lava lamps, and one robotic device. The results show that most developers
preferred an easily visible but unobtrusive ambient device combined with an
e-mail describing the problem in more detail.
Description
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Computer Science