Rickard Nilsson

I’ve previously blogged about how we practice Continuous Integration with TeamCity at Ninetech but some time has passed and now it is time for an update.

After an upgrade to TFS2010 we started to use its build system for some of our development projects but since many of them lacked automated testing the usage didn’t really take off. To change this, an internship project was started where students from Karlstad’s university would create some way to highlight the opportunity to get immediate feedback for team members as well as stake holders and other interested at our company.

The result of the project can be seen below. It is our TFS TV placed on the wall of our developer room such that all developers, as well as any one who passes by, can see the current status of our projects. It is a WPF app which cycles through all of our TFS build configurations, gathers the latest test data, goes to our web site and fetches the photo of the latest committer, and displays it all on the 42” plasma screen.

The effect we’re after is to raise the level of awareness and usage of continuous integration and automated testing by providing immediate feedback to all teams when something fails and as well as a quick way of keeping track of a project through some of its metrics.

As seen below no one can miss if a build is failing which makes everybody who commits to a project on the screen extra careful not to commit code which is untested or brakes the build in any way.

What’s next? As we’re using a mix of source control systems (TFS, Git, Hg, SVN) and continuous integration platforms (TFS, TeamCity) the plan is to support TeamCity as well and maybe find a way to release it into the wild. We’ll se what happens.