What is the most useful information to display at the front of the office?

Question

The company I work for has just purchased 4 32" LCD screens to be mounted at the front of the office for demonstration purposes. Whilst we are not demonstrating (most of the time), the screens are to be used as development information screens for the whole team.

What information would people recommend displaying to be most useful to the team? Our focus is on hosted business web-apps but I am interested in what other teams doing other types of development find useful too. Pointers on how to gather the displayed information would be useful also.

Answer 1

• Information about your continuous integration status.
• Major Development Milestones that have been hit in the last week
• Releases within the last month (including a short description why this release is awesome)

Use it as motivational board. The achievements of software development are seldom communicated well enough.

Answer 2

• Weather radar from intellicast.com
• Latest Checkin.
• Number of checkins per day
• Number of customers that use software
• Metrics on Bugs found/fixed and the ratio.

Answer 3

Since you're hosting apps for your customers, server and network status information would probably be useful.

Heck, why not create a "chat room" for the dev team to discuss issues and post a streaming version of that as well?

Schedule information, Scrum notes from that morning, a gantt chart...the possibilities abound.

Answer 4

One screen could be an aggregated RSS feed of development topics pulled from sites such as Stack Overflow (or even Coding Horror). Not sure what your goal for these screens is, but I could see it useful to me if you had a feed with topics specific to your development team headlined. If I were there, I'd glimpse them, maybe catch an interesting thread, and go learn something. Funnel a bunch of keywords and tags through a Yahoo Pipe and dump it to the screen.

That's if they are more "informal and informational."

Answer 5

• Outstanding bugcount, sorted by priority and severity. You can likely get this from your bugtracking tool programmatically.
• Depending on your process management system, possibly a list of feature requests and the percentage complete on each of them. Again, you can probably get this programmatically from your process management / time tracking tool.
• Time spent in the current development cycle, and time remaining. Again, this should be available from your process / management / time tracking tool. You may want to use this data with your bugcounts as well to give a bugs / day fix rate.
• If you're a public company with a profit-sharing plan (i.e. stock or options), the current price of the stock (this can be surprisingly strongly motivating). You can get stock data from several sources online programmatically (although a small delay may be injected unless you're paying for the service).

Answer 6

I think most popular pages from your webapp(s) would be a fun/interesting thing to show on a big monitor up front.

Another would be a live feed of your error reporting.

Answer 7

The movie 'Office Space'

Answer 8

We have one monitor showing all meetings for the day, with start-end, subject, and room. I find this helpful, not only for my orientation, but also to see what other people do at our company.

Answer 9

xkcd, bunny, dilbert and savage chickens :-)