Monitoring software builds with a traffic light
posted Feb 12th 2012 10:25am by Brian Benchofffiled under: arduino hacks, Software Development
[JD] at isotope11 was looking for a way to get instant feedback whenever a developer broke a piece of software they were working on. After finding a 48 inch tall traffic light, he knew what he had to do. Now, the entire development team knows the status of their code from a traffic light hanging in the corner.
isotope11 runs a continuous integration server to do the quality assurance on their software projects. It’s a lot more flexible than the ‘compile and pray’ setup we’re used to, but then again C isn’t very well suited to test-driven development. When one of [JD]‘s developers breaks a piece of code, the CI server will send a warning to an Arduino where all the electronic magic happens.
To light the traffic light, [JD] used a few relays to drive the 120 volt bulbs in the traffic light. The traffic light is very easy to read – red means something is broken, green means everything is alright, and yellow means a test suite is being run.
Check out the video of [JD]‘s TDD visualization after the break.
um is that one of those hollywood filmset lights with different colours so it comes out normal in postproduction? am i stoned?