Continuous Feedback - Continuous Integration - page 211

Disadvantages: People don't always have immediate access to
e-mail, and there's the potential of inundating (“spamming”)
project members with e-mails.

E-mail is the most common form of feedback for CI. A CI system
can send an e-mail if the build succeeds or fails along with any details
that you have specified. For example, I configure CruiseControl to
send an e-mail in HTML that displays the status, the changes since the
last build, the unit tests run, and the deployment files created. It also
provides a link to the CruiseControl reporting application where I can
see detailed information on the builds, including access to inspection
artifacts and trend graphs. E-mail is a very useful form of feedback,
but it does have its disadvantages. There is not an effective way to stay
notified of trends in software without being inundated with e-mails
that come every time something changes.
Listing 9-1 shows a CruiseControl config.xml file configured to
send e-mails to the last person (@localhost) to check in files and the
technical lead (pduvall@localhost) on the project using the default-
suffix attribute of the htmlemail element.

LISTING 9-1 CruiseControl config.xml Configured to Send E-mail

…
<publishers>
<currentbuildstatuspublisher
file="buildstatus.txt"/>
<htmlemail mailhost="localhost"
xslDir="xsl"
css="cruisecontrol.css"
returnaddress="buildstatus@localhost"
returnname="ABC Project Build Status"
defaultsuffix="@localhost"
spamwhilebroken="true"
buildresultsurl="http://localhost:8989/cruisecontrol>
<always address="pduvall@localhost"/>
<failure address="pduvall@localhost "/>
</htmlemail>
</publishers>

Figure 9-4 is a sample HTML message you can receive on the
build status from a CI server. Notice also that the Inbox received three
messages in just a couple of minutes; many people (including you) can
get overloaded and begin to ignore this form of feedback.