Features Tips & Tricks

Taking responsibility: a part of daily team communication

Even though the software development team many comprise of highly-motivated professionals, they can still introduce inconsistencies in their code, and both the builds and the project code base can break from time to time. When it happens, it may take a while to figure out what the problem is and whose code is the cause of the build failure. Precious time is lost while trying to find out what is wrong. The team members can also assume someone else is on top of things but in reality nothing is done.

TeamCity’s take responsibility feature can help in such situations. When a build fails and the team members don’t take any actions, it is visible on TeamCity’s web interface, and team members can be notified on the fact setting up flexible notification rules.
A developer who broke the build can take responsibility either on the web and from within the IDE:

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As soon as the fix is done, TeamCity automatically informs on that.

If the developer discovers that his code is OK and it’s somebody else’s fault, he or she can give up the responsibility and, again, the fact becomes evident to others. As soon as someone else states that it’s his fault, the team is notified on that via different notification means:

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A result? Face-to-face communication but the team organizes itself, and nobody from the outside dictates what to do. Moreover, you get rid of the “broken window” syndrome, and the builds’ problems are not your team’s morale breakers anymore.

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, continuous integration, build management, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008

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