The Build Doctor

(Kushal Pisavidia has been working on enhancements to XFD – it’s only fair that he gets to do the release announcement)

The beginnings of XFD
A little over a year ago on the 4th of May 2010, XFD was born through the work of Chris and Julian. Since that date it’s gone from a minimally viable status indicator, to a tool which numerous companies use with a number of CI servers to keep their build status visible. The current supported list includes:

• Hudson
• Jenkins
• CI Joe
• CruiseControl
• Team City (via a plugin)
• CCNet, cc.rb, Go (via a plugin)

We’re always on the lookout for new servers to add.

Move to CoffeeScript

For those not familiar with it,

CoffeeScript

is a little language that compiles to JavaScript. It takes the “good parts” of JavaScript and exposes it through a cleaner syntax. Making it easier to stay away from the bad.

However CoffeeScript isn’t all about syntax sugar. It’s about being more confident that the code you write is correct the first time, while knowing that tests are less brittle and can be changed in a matter of keystrokes. This has made developing XFD a lot simpler.

HTTP Auth
HTTP Auth is by far one of the most requested features. In this release we’ve added support for both Hudson and Jenkins with more support planned.

Better feedback
In making XFD we sought to make a highly visible build status indicator. Related to the concept of visibility is feedback. This is best illustrated by an analogy to what everyday life would be like without it. Imagine trying to play a guitar, slice bread using a knife, or write using a pen if none of the actions produced any effect for several seconds.

XFD seeks to make this feedback step clearer for build jobs, but didn’t make it obvious what the application was doing at every step. Now, it’s incredibly easy to follow along and get clear information about what XFD is doing as you use it.

Increased accessibility
The emphasis on Red/Green for build status meant that colourblind users may have difficulty viewing the status of their builds. To counter this we’ve added universal symbols in addition to the colours to make this clearer for everyone. The different symbols are used to indicate different levels of importance or urgency with no need to vary their colours.

We hope you enjoy this new release, and let us know what you think!