Browsing by Author "Ablett, Ruth"

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    Build Notifications in Agile Environments
    (2008-01-14) Ablett, Ruth; Maurer, Frank; Sharlin, Ehud; Denzinger, Joerg; Schock, Craig
    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.
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    ItemOpen Access
    BuildBot: A Robotic Software Development Monitor in an Agile Environment
    (2006-05-18) Ablett, Ruth; Maurer, Frank; Sharlin, Ehud; Denzinger, Joerg
    In this paper, we describe BuildBot, a robot developed to assist with continuous integration of a software build in Agile development teams. BuildBot can interact physically with individual members of the team and be an active part of the development process by bringing together human-robot interaction with human group dynamics and knowledge about software engineering concepts. This paper describes the design and implementation of a robot that can sense virtual stimuli, in this case the state of a software build, and react accordingly in a physical way. By increasing awareness of the state of the software build, BuildBot assists in the self-supervision of teams.