BuildBot: Robotic Monitoring of Agile Software Development Teams

Abstract - In this paper, we describe BuildBot, a robotic interface developed to assist with the continuous integration process utilized by agile software development teams. BuildBot’s physical nature allows us to engage the agile software development team members through vision, hearing and touch. In this way, BuildBot becomes an active part of the development process by bringing together human-robot interaction, human group dynamics and software engineering concepts through a number of interaction modalities. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the BuildBot prototype, a robotic interface that can sense virtual stimuli, in this case the state of a software build, and react accordingly in a physical way via vision, sound and touch. We present an early evaluation comparing BuildBot to two other tools used by the agile team to monitor the continuous integration process. We also show preliminary results indicating that BuildBot may be more noticeable to the develo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: roman
• Authors: Ruth Ablett, Ehud Sharlin, Frank Maurer, Jörg Denzinger, Craig Schock
• Keywords: Agile Software, Agile Software Development, BuildBot, Robotics, ROMAN 2007