One of the cornerstones of any successful organization is communication. On Agile teams, we often meet to share information, update one another on progress, to reflect on that progress and discuss how the process can be improved. These interactions, be they stand-up or retrospective meetings, provide this information at regular intervals. But what if you need “real-time” information sharing?
Consider the concept of “one piece flow”, often treated as the holy grail of engineering process purists. Lean/Kanban fan boys live to talk about this at conferences, and in the isle outside my cube. The idea is that a single “workpiece” at a time moves through the workflow. In the software development process, this is rarely limited to a single item, but instead is throttled by WIP limits to minimize the bottlenecks in the process. For example, the number of items worked on by developers is limited so that the count of items designated “ready for test” is kept at a manageable level. As a tester on an agile team, I’d like to know as soon as an item is moved from the “wip/development” phase to the “test/validation” phase.
Consider the following basic stream structure -
In an ideal model, testers would be notified as soon as an issue is promoted from the WIP stream to the Validation stream. This model assumes that the project is utilizing AccuRev change packages to track work items as issues. Having a distinct stream for validation purposes simplifies the job of the tester. All issues that exist in this stream have been unit tested by developers, passed basic regression tests, and are ready to be explored, validated, and promoted to the next stage in the workflow.
So, how can this level of communication be achieved? AccuRev triggers! The rest of this post will demonstrate how the server post-promote trigger could be used to provide updates using arguably the king of “What’s Happening?” – Twitter.
Why use Twitter in your Backing Stream?
Why not? Sure, you could use e-mail. But who wants more e-mail? Tweet it, and let them aggregate the information for you. Team members can follow the account, or not. Pointy-haired managers that dream of pie charts and love visibility can subscribe to an RSS feed, that you don’t have to manage. Lastly, if you’re an agilista, you’re already hip and trendy, (and let’s face it, you probably already tweeted about the awesome presentation on Lean that you saw at the latest Agile conference).
The Server Post-Promote Trigger
I am not going to go into the gory details of the AccuRev trigger system. Here’s what you need to know.
- The trigger can be written in whatever language you like. In this example, I use Ruby.
- The trigger needs to be registered with the AccuRev server, and associated with the depot for your software project.
For this exercise, I wrote a quick script called tweet_post_promote.rb. The first step is to register this script with AccuRev.
>accurev mktrig -p SoftwareProject server-post-promote-trig ~/dev/ruby/tweet_post_promote.rb
Once registered, the trigger will now fire for all promotes in the SoftwareProject depot. Let’s take a look at the contents of the script.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘crack’
require ‘twitter’
ACCUREV_DIR = “/sandbox/amonty/accurev/”
ACCUREV_STORAGE = “#{ACCUREV_DIR}storage/”
ACCUREV_SITE_SLICE = “#{ACCUREV_STORAGE}site_slice/”
USER = ‘ValidationBot’
PASS = ‘password’
def load_trigger_data(file)
xml = ”
File.open(“#{ACCUREV_SITE_SLICE}#{file}”) do |f|
xml = f.read
end
Crack::XML.parse(xml)
end
def twitter_get_auth(user, pass)
httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new(user, pass)
Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)
end
def main()
hash = load_trigger_data ARGV[1]
if hash["triggerInput"]["stream1"] == “Validation” then
changePackageIssue = hash["triggerInput"]["changePackages"]["changePackageID"]
update_string = “Issue #{changePackageIssue} just promoted to stream #{hash["triggerInput"]["stream1"]}”
twitter = twitter_get_auth(USER, PASS)
twitter.update update_string
end
end
main if __FILE__ == $0
This script is very simple. It makes use of the Ruby gems crack and Twitter. Essentially, the script takes the XML trigger file (provided as ARGV[1]) and loads it into a hash. Then the script checks to see if the stream being promoted to is our Validation stream. If so, it uses the twitter gem to update the status on our ValidationBot account.
A more useful example is to provide a link to the AccuRev Web UI Issue screen.
This way, anyone subscribing to the feed can click on the link and open the issue in the AccuRev Web UI.
This is a small example of how AccuRev triggers can be used to increase communication on your team. Testers can follow the ValidationBot account and be notified via their favorite Twitter client whenever an issue is promoted to the validation stream and they need to begin work on it. This could obviously be extended to include additional information (actual file changes, for example). That is, of course, if you can fit it into 140 characters. 
For more information on AccuRev triggers, please see the Administrator’s Guide.
