Announcing: Big Visible Cruise
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been pulling together a simple Information Radiator for CruiseControl.net. The idea behind the project is to use the power of visualizations to provide simple, visible, and informative displays that expose the current-state of your automated continuous integration builds.
I threw this app together very quickly a week or so ago and I’ve been amazed at how addictive it’s become. In our team room, we have a dedicated monitor that is always running the application. The result is that you know exactly where the builds stand as soon as you enter the room.
I initially wanted to put this together as a temporary solution to picking out what items we will use to show our build status. We always bounce back and forth about Nabaztag, orbs, lava lamps, and other physical things to show our build status. It’s usually easier to find an extra monitor than it is to get a purchase request approved for a wireless-enabled rabbit. Big Visible Cruise is the same idea, it’s just a visualization instead of a physical device. Judging by how much we all enjoy seeing it, it will probably stick around in addition to any physical device we pick up.
You can find out more about the project at http://code.google.com/p/bigvisiblecruise/. After the holiday I’ll post some pictures and explain how we are utilizing the big display in our team room.
In the meantime, you can likely get an idea from looking at the display while it’s monitoring three different projects in the following screen shot…
This shows that I have three projects (Foo, Bar, and Some Project) being run on my CCNet server. In this example Foo and Bar are successful and Some Project is broken.
The other state that isn’t represented in the pic above is the “building” state. When a project is building, the row representing the project will turn yellow.
By default, BVC will poll every 15 seconds. I recommend using BVC with CCTray so that you have a big visual display along with auditory clues about your build process.
Big Visible Cruise is being released under the MIT license.
If you’re interested in WPF and/or information visualization, I’d love any contributions 
I plan on providing some interesting visualizations over the next couple of months. Let me know what you’d like to see on the RoadMap page.
November 21st, 2007 at 10:47 am
Dude, love how the acronym plays off Big Visible Chart. Nice
November 21st, 2007 at 2:27 pm
A co-worker of mine (http://melgrubb2.spaces.live.com/) is working on programming his USB rocket launcher (http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/8a0f/) to point at the person that just checked in code, then if the build fails it launches.
November 21st, 2007 at 4:00 pm
[...] One of the problems with Cruise Control is that while it is constant feedback, it can be pretty easy to ignore. Even with CCTray you can ignore a dot in your task bar, but its a little harder to ignore a huge red band on a monitor in your room. Perhaps even more importantly its embarrassing to have a huge red band displayed on a monitor in the room. Big Visible Cruise is a nice little app that makes it easy to display your build status on that spare monitor in your room. (or even nicer would be to grab one of those cheap Vizio LCD TVs and throw it up on the wall) -James Published Wednesday, November 21, 2007 2:17 PM by .Avery Blog [...]
November 21st, 2007 at 6:15 pm
re: the rocket launcher
Luckily I sit across the room, well out of the range of the broken-build-alert-device… but Matt is only feet from it, well with in range.
As for the BVC - love the idea… just sux that the current project is using TFS and not CCNet. Perhaps BVC will support that in v1.1?
November 22nd, 2007 at 1:41 am
Matt…
I’ve thought about the rocket launcher a few times myself
Steve…
I’ll give TFS some thought.
November 22nd, 2007 at 2:50 pm
The one I really, really want is the ambient orb (or similar lighting device), although BVC has the obvious advantage that it highlights project status, not just overall status.. interesting stuff - will be watching keenly!