Is anybody using twitter (or yammer or laconica) in their software development team? Would like to know your experience.

Question

Hello,

I'd like to know about software development teams that use twitter (or yammer or laconica) in their process.

What are you reporting? Do you have automated tweet e.g. from build or test machine?

Thanks a lot for your answer.

Answer 1

Russ Fustion (of Microsoft) presented a session at the Orlando (Florida) code camp where a sample to tweet when a automated build is completed was presented. You can watch the video.

Basically the idea is that for teams that have a build server that re-builds the entire application periodically, the build server can send a tweet notifying all team members that the build is complete and the sucess/failure status.

Answer 2

Our development team all individually tweet, but we also have a Twitter account which represents the team as a whole. Usage is not completely settled yet, but so far we've tried:

• Announcing deployments ("just pushed 2.0.2737 to production. details at http://tinyurl.org/12345")
• Automated updates for long-running tools ("Phoenix migration is 23% done and currently averaging 13s/unit. Expect to finish 5-7-09"

We've tried to focus on information that our customers care about. A useful Twitter service has to strike a delicate balance of too little and too much information. For things that happen frequently, like continuous integration builds, we just email internally. That's something every team member needs to know and the audience is well-defined, so we can push that. Things like production pushes have a much broader audience with a wide range of interest level, so a passive service like Twitter is ideal for providing that information to the people who care, at their convenience.

Answer 3

I started using Laconica on our Intranet to capture events from scheduled batch jobs and updates from Subversion commits. I use a simple batch file that uses curl. I've posted examples here: SVN Post-Commit to Laconica