Andreas Knecht, JIRA Developer

On the JIRA team we have an old tradition to let the Confluence team tackle new things and steal their ideas if they end up working out.

We've recently had a couple of problems when developers would keep committing code if the builds are broken on Bamboo. We generally aim to stop all commits until the builds are passing again, since it makes it easier to find the problem as well as making developers think twice before committing ;). The good old IM notifications were just not quite strong enough; we needed something more visual:

cimg0001.jpg

We've setup an old box to be our Bamboo monitor in the JIRA area. As soon as a build fails, it's displayed bright red on this screen. We're currently only displaying the 4 main JIRA builds (Head unit & func tests, Branch unit & func tests), as we don't quite have enough screen real estate.

Bamboo provides a list of builds (with auto-refresh) via the telemetry.action (e.g.: See http://opensource.bamboo.atlassian.com/telemetry.action).
We then stole Confluence's Greasemonkey script to only display the builds we are interested in:


// ==UserScript==
// @name Show selected Bamboo builds
// @namespace bamboo
// @include https://url.to.server/bamboo/telemetry.action
// ==/UserScript==

var links = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (var i=0; i<links.length; i++)
{
var link = links[i];
if (link.id != "viewBuild:JIRAFUNC-JDK16" &&
link.id != "viewBuild:BASIC-JDK16" &&
link.id != "viewBuild:JIRAFUNCBRA-JDK16" &&
link.id != "viewBuild:JBRANCH-JDK16")
{
link.parentNode.style.display = "none";
}
}

Here's another picture showing a little better where the box has been setup:

cimg0002.jpg


Tags: bamboo jira

7 Comment(s)

Apparently at ThoughtWorks they use a nabaztag to do something similar (albeit in a 'cuter' manner).

Seem to have a plug-in for it as well (although the link doesn't work atm):
http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/3rdPartyCCStuff

By Peter Hannam at June 14, 2007 2:51 AM

Even better: get a Nabaztag (http://www.nabaztag.com) to tell you when a build is broken. Nothing's more irritating than a talking rabbit :)

By Fabian Crabus at June 14, 2007 8:03 AM

I saw this technique in Pragmatic Project Automation. Does everyone respond this it well?

By Ken Young at June 14, 2007 8:33 AM

Even better: use a projector. ;)

By Bob Lee at June 14, 2007 9:10 AM

That's pretty funny :).

We'll probably make the UI a little more funky at some stage (would be pretty simple with some more GreaseMonkey scripting), but for now this will do us. It was only meant to be a "I've got 10 minutes in my lunch break to set this up" type of project...

To answer your question Ken: Yes, so far everyone on the JIRA team likes the screen. You've got a really quick way of checking the latest status of the builds by glancing over your shoulder. We've had this in place for the last 6 months anyway via IM & E-mail notifications. This is just more visual.

By Andreas Knecht at June 14, 2007 3:47 PM

There's always the old standby: Ambient Orb.

By Geoffrey Wiseman at June 14, 2007 6:00 PM

We send our Bamboo messages to our Nabaztag (http://flickr.com/photos/pip/552185862/) using a Jabber bot - it just reads out the normal failure/success messages and moves its ears into a certain position (flat for failure, up for success). Works a charm.

By Phil Wilson at June 19, 2007 5:21 AM

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