One icon instead of 1000 emails - keep track of your builds

So, you have a continuous integration system. You’ve spent a lot of time setting it up, and now it builds a project on every commit and runs the tests. You also have some task that runs the longer tests every night. Sounds great, but is it useful for the team?

When there are multiple people working on the project, they break and fix builds all the time. Sometimes it is a missing file, sometimes a broken test. Your build system can send an email notification for each such event. But, when you are coding, you don’t want to switch to read them. And, after a while, you have a pile of such unread notifications. One of them might be important, but you need to read all of them to find out.

At some point you might see that notification pile in your inbox is now unusable, and you can go to build system web app to check the builds from time to time. But, that requires repetitive work, and programmers like to optimize such activity away. As a result, you might end up with the team that ignores all the red flags raised by your continuous integration system.



So, what can you do about it? What you really need is not a history of notifications, but current status. You need a quick, immediate way of telling if everything is OK. And Catlight does just that. It shows in tray the current status of the builds and tests that matter to you.

You don’t need to react to a failed test right away, but the app will remind you about it every time you look at the clock. Finally, every team member knows if there is a build that needs his attention. And when someone fixes it, CatLight will go off, back to normal state, for everyone.

CatLight is a free tool that shows the status of your builds in tray, and provides notifications when that status changes. It supports multiple continuous integration systems including AppVeyor, Jenkins, Travis CI, TFS and VSTS.

You can download CatLight for Windows and Mac OS X.