The Development Stream

I was reading today about GitHub's use of chat bots to handle releases and continuous integration, and I think this is absolutely brilliant. In fact, it occurs to me that using a chat bot, or a set of chat bots, can provide an extremely effective workflow for any continuous-deployment project. Of course, it doesn't necessarily have to be a chat room with chat bots; it can be any sort of stream that can be updated in real-time - it could be a Twitter feed, or a web page, or anything. The sort of setup I envision would work something like this:

Everyone on the engineering team - developers, testers, managers, the whole lot - stay signed in to the stream as long as they're "on duty". Every time code is committed to a global branch - that is, a general-use preproduction or production branch - it shows up in the stream. Then the automated integration tests run, and the results are output to the stream. The commit is deployed to the appropriate environment, and the deployment status is output to the stream. Any issues that occur after deployment are output to the stream as well, for immediate investigation; this includes logged errors, crashes, alerts, assertion failures, and so on. Any time a QA opens a defect against a branch, the ticket summary is output to the stream. The stream history (if it's not already compiled from some set of persistent-storage sources) should be logged and archived for a period of time, maybe 7 to 30 days.

It's very important that the stream be as sparse as possible: no full stack traces with error messages, no full commit messages, just enough information to keep developers informed of what they will need to look into further elsewhere. This sort of live, real-time information stream is crucial in the success of any continuous-deployment environment, in order to keep the whole team abreast of any issues that might be introduced into production, along with when and how they were introduced.

Now, what I've described is a read-only stream: you can't do anything with it. GitHub's system of using an IRC bot allows them to issue commands to the bot to trigger deployments and the like. That could be part of the stream, or it could be part of another tool; as long as the deployment, and its results, are output to the shared stream for all to see. This is part of having the operational awareness necessary to quickly identify and fix issues, and to maintain maximum uptime.

There are a lot of possible solutions for this sort of thing; Campfire looks particularly promising because of its integration with other tools for aggregating instrumentation data. If you have experience with this sort of setup, please post in the comments, I'd love to hear about it!