Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Start playing the Continuous Integration game for real

I read "The Continuous Integration Build Game" 6 months ago, just when I had found Hudson. The idea behind the game seemed so simple and at that time we had problems with people comitting code that broke the build and failed the (very few) unit tests. I thought that the game could help out, as people like competitions and they would try to "win" the game. To win the game the developers have to commit code that is compiling and add unit tests.

The rules of the game are:
* -10 for breaking a build
* +1 for doing a build with no failures
* -1 for each new test failures
* +1 for each new test that passes

The plugin is more a proof of concept than a real full fledged plugin that will suit everyone. Thus the points for each rule are hard coded and can not be changed in this release. So if you are finding this plugin useful let me know.

For each build you will get a summary stating how many points the build was worth, and if you want you can see what rules that were involved.

The plugin installs a leader board on the front page, which shows who are on top.

Monday, April 07, 2008

Use Mylyn and you will be happy in two months

I must say that I really like Mylyn. Besides all the issue tracker integration, the task context features are great. Today I got a "ahh, this is to good to be true" moment.

I was working on my clear case plugin for Hudson, and was going to fix a feature request I entered two months ago. So I activated the task, and suddenly two files was opened in the editor. The caret was moved to the method that was going to be involved in fixing the feature. Apparently Eclipse has improved recently and it knew how to fix the feature before I knew.

Then it dawned on me that I had started looking into fixing the feature two months ago, and thats why the task context already contained the two files. I just picked up where I left two months ago, and could continue working on the feature request within minutes. That is great functionality that doesn't intrude on the user, it just works!

So if you are using Eclipse and haven't tested mylyn, start using it today and you will be happy in two months! (and the time in between!)