I Love To Burst Your Bubble

From the slideshow accompanying this story, we find how one company makes its office into a dance floor:

Employee Nick Miyate demonstrated the red light and bubble machine that turns on whenever an engineer fixes a software error, or “build break.”

Some companies I worked for, we would have gotten nothing done under nothing but red lights and all of our computers would have eventually suffered from bubble exposure.

I take it to mean that they activate it only when someone breaks a nightly build and fixes it and not when a developer fixes any old software defect.  If it does, the bubble machine usage could be deployed sparingly if:

  1. They don’t have QA and only defects the software engineers find are logged and fixed.  That is to say, about six per release.
  2. They do have QA, and all defects except six per release are logged by QA but resolved in the defect tracker to won’t fix, not reproducible, obsolete, not a bug, or all of the other resolutions designed to handle defects without troubling the “engineers.”

We handle this sort of thing not to dissimilarly, by the way.  Whenever an engineer “fixes” a defect, we laugh bubbly at him and reopen it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 4:09 am by The Director and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “I Love To Burst Your Bubble”

  1. scarytester Says:
    September 9th, 2009 at 1:28 am

    I fail to see how rewarding developers with a disco every time they fix a build break is a good incentive. Clearly this means in order to achieve red light bubble heroism, they must break the build in the first place. And then, oh yay look at me, I cleaned up my own mess! Wow you’re a champion.

    But hey, cure is better than prevention. Isn’t that how the saying goes?

  2. The Director Says:
    September 9th, 2009 at 7:24 am

    In my experience, those gizmos are only trotted out for the newspapermen anyway and aren’t part of actual daily life.