Mr. Roboto

The Joel Test is a good starting point for gauging the level of professionalism where you work, or are thinking of working. One of the twelve items is “Do you use version control?” While this is incredibly important on its own, there are ways you can enhance your use of it.

The Perforce revision control software comes with a sample Python script for emailing out change notifications to everyone on the team. I improved the mail formatting a bit and we run it every fifteen minutes at work. I think it's a great motivator. After checking something in I find myself looking forward to receiving the email. When someone checks in a particularly important change people will hit “Reply” and congratulate them, providing even more positive feedback.

Change notifications are good to push to the team, as opposed to being fetched from a wiki or database, because they affect people in ways both expected and unexpected. It's good to know, even in a peripheral way, what's going on. Our art team receives all the same checkin emails, and often when something goes haywire it gives them a starting point for tracking down the problem. Similarly, sometimes a coder will see a checkin email and realize that the reviewer missed something: some of the checked-in code is a duplicate of something that already exists, say. It's easy to hit “Reply” and send the information to the person who made the checkin.

We've found other uses for automated emails at work. Once a week people get an automated email summarizing their open bugs, for instance. Another emailer that has acquired a personality of its own is Mr. Roboto (so named because it signs emails “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto” after the Styx song).

Often an artist will create an entire suite of new files—model, sub-models, textures, and so forth—but forget to check in some of them. Since they have the complete set of files on their local machine they don't see that there is a problem for everyone else. It can be tedious to track down the responsible party by hand; thus the birth of Mr. Roboto.

Mr. Roboto does a dependency analysis every fifteen minutes and identifies files that reference missing files. Then he goes spelunking in the version control database to figure out who the likely culprit is. Currently he considers two scenarios: that the missing file was deleted, or that it was not added. If the missing file is in version control but has been deleted, Mr. Roboto complains to the person who deleted it. Otherwise, Mr. Roboto complains to the last person to change the file with the broken dependency.

This catches a lot of the most common problem cases. Obviously there are scenarios where this fails. For instance, I run scripts to do automated changes to large batches of art files periodically. Once I've done that I become the last changer on those files so complaints related to them come my way. It isn't too bad, though, and it encourages us to keep everything clean. Most of the time we aren't missing files, which has not been the case on previous projects I've worked on.

Since we now run Mr. Roboto every fifteen minutes to catch problems quickly, we ended up adding a throttling mechanism so he'd only complain about any given file once a day.