BuildBot: Robotic Monitoring of Agile Software Development Teams

In this paper, we describe BuildBot, a robotic interface developed to assist with the continuous integration process utilized by co-located 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 an agile team to monitor the continuous integration process. We also show preliminary results indicating that BuildBot may be more noticeable to the developers and contribute to a fun and lighthearted atmosphere. We argue that by increasing awareness of the state of the software build, BuildBot can assist in the self-supervision of agile software engineering teams and can help the team achieve its goals in a more engaging and sociable manner.