Software to simplify displaying build status on a big visible monitor for team?

Question

I had a little bit of budget left at year end and I wanted to start a little skunk works project to display build status what everyone was working on (our team is aobut 10 folks all told). I am thinking to buy a 47" LCD HD TV and drive it from a small pc via a browser/.NET web application.

I was going to build the software over the christmas break since we are closed for 2 weeks starting this Friday. I thought I would solicit advise/feedback on what other teams had done. a lot of the tools we use SVN, Mantis have RSS feeds that I was thinking to render. Is this the way to go ?

Thanks for any feedback in advance.

Answer 1

Would it really benefit your team in any way?
I'd rather brought something like a table hockey machine to make lunch time more fun.

Answer 2

I'd say stick with RSS. Tried and true and real easy to work with especially in a .NET environment.

Answer 3

A friend of mine is teaching himself how to work with Arduino so that he can build a computer-controlled LED sculpture for Burning Man next year. His first project? Using Arduino to control a little array of red and green LEDs so that everyone on his team can look up at it and see if the build is broken and who broke it.

But really, unless that's a road you're interested in going down, in your case I'd write a simple WinForms app that used a FileSystemWatcher to check for changes in the RSS file, an XSLT transform to turn it into HTML, and a WebBrowser to display it. If you know XSLT and understand the contents of your RSS feed, that's about 2-3 hours of work tops.

Answer 4

I would check out the existing solutions first. There is a good summary at http://www.build-doctor.com/2009/08/18/big-visible-continuous-integration/ and http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/joshuaflanagan/archive/2009/08/28/big-visible-teamcity.aspx looks interesting.

It all depends on what Continuous integration server you have.