Multi Team Commit Solution

June 25th, 2007

At Integrum we work on several large projects. Often times a team might have six or more members working in a tight segment of code base. If the entire team is doesn’t communicate efficiently lots of time can be lost to dealing with resolving conflicts within version control (SVN in our case) before doing a commit.

We had started to use a “commit token” a la a stuffed penguin. Only a pair holding the said penguin could perform a commit. This helped greatly in reducing conflicts and encouraging discussion amongst developers. However, it fell down pretty quickly when the team was more distributed.

Josh Knowles had suggested we create some little system to allow us to digitally pass a token, perhaps through an OS X widget or something similar. Jade Meskill had a few moments one night last week and decided to hack together a plugin for rBot to allow for such a “token” concept in IRC. This made a great deal of sense because all of our developers generally are in IRC when they are working. Jade has submitted the IRC token for inclusion in rBot, but in the meantime you can just apply the patch to your rBot.

So how might this work flow look?

To list all current tokens in the Token system:
!yourbot token tokens

To create a new token:
!yourbot token create <token name>

To destroy an existing token:
!yourbot token destroy <token name>

To pickup the token:
!yourbot token grab <token name>

To drop the token:
!yourbot token drop <token name>

To steal the token from someone:
!yourbot token steal <token name>

To add your nick to the list for alerts on a token:
!yourbot token watch <token name>

To blast a message to anyone watching a token:
!yourbot token alert <token name> “your message here”

To let people know you are committing:
!yourbot token commit <token name>

If you use an IRC client that notifies you when your name is mentioned this is a nice little way to have a distributed real time commit token. Jade is awesome for whipping this up. We all thank him!!!!! If you like it let him know!