Every morning in Africa, an xper wakes up. He knows he must run at full speed.

To run at full speed we always need to know where we are. Our mileage for the daily xp routine are some nice songs.
The day begins at 8:30 am with the reggae sound of “Get Up, Stand Up ” by Bob Marley which marks our standup meeting, if we are in the relaxation room (when we don’t code we are in relaxation room, more on this in a later post), we know that it’s time to end up in the development room.
Nautilus Team use the pair programming practice, where pairs are changed at 11:30 am after the first 5 pomodoros with a partner, if you are not responsible for the current user story, you switch companion at the sound of the Romagna Mia by Orchestra Casadei, a touch of italian folklore.
At 12:55 am it’s lunch time at the jingle of the television program “Il pranzo è servito”.

And here it comes the end of the xprogramming day. At 4:45 pm the last sound trigger alerts us to reestimate the story cards and to write a journal of what has been done on each user story. The chosen sound is borrowed from the jingle of a popular italian soccer tv show, “90° Minuto”. Why? Because “90° Minuto” is the last minute of a soccer game.

Our development day also has additional, non-scheduled sounds that help us in the learn/test/code/release cycle.

Feedback is value number two in eXtreme Programming, that is the reason why some teams use lava lamps to signal with a bloody red light a failing build.

Unfortunately such a visual alarm can easily be discarded by xprogrammers. A substantially stronger signal is given by noisy sound triggers: we have elephant bellows that break our ears each time the integration build fails. For the most of us this loudy sound is an additional source of care when committing GoodCodeThatDoesntFail :-).

Failing local builds have their custom loudy jingle. On some development machines we have Immanuel Casto’s Crash that annoyes us with its geeky refrain “I can see an error message on my screen, I feel it…”. Roaring bears, crashing glasses and other kinds of annoying sounds are also used on development machines.

Synchronization between sounds allow pairs to keep a sort of pace in our daily work. Jingles, alerts can “sound” annoying, but they are a way to help geeky developers emerge from the depths of source code.

Authors: Moreno Carullo, Marco Fracassi