September 07, 2004 - Oozing Confidence
Mike Clark writes about his visit to Agitar's office: “I got an opportunity to visit Alberto's project a few weeks back and witness first-hand those infamous lava lamps. You really can't miss them. When I walked in, the red lamp was bubbling. And yet the managers weren't beating the programmers about the head and shoulders, as some might fear. Indeed, I didn't sense any sort of panic or condescension. What I did sense was confidence.”“See, the team had learned to take the red lamp as feedback. They run an extensive battery of tests on every build and the red lamp was telling them that their tests were actually testing something. An assertion somewhere had failed the last time somebody checked in code. This is a good thing. Indeed, this is what continuous integration is all about. It becomes a bad thing when the green lamp never turns on. So they were diligently (and confidently) working to repair the build as a priority over other tasks for the day because they didn't want to work on unstable ground.”
“It's important to note that Alberto's team is a bright group of folks building impressive products. Feedback is serious business, but they've found a way to make it fun. They use the lava lamps to their advantage, not as gimmicks or another way for the pointy-haired manager to keep tabs on their work. And when the lamp does go red, they're confident that it won't stay that way for long.”
Posted by Mark DeVisser at September 7, 2004 06:42 PM
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Comments
The lava lamps are cute ;)
A nice variation of the broken build wall of shame, like http://tinderbox.mozilla.org
Posted by: Karl Pauls on October 26, 2004 05:06 PM
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