This is a physical toy traffic light to be used with software development TDD (and testing in general) tools. It will not boost your productivity nor make you a better programmer or TDD practitioner, but it looks cool :)
Yellow: Tests are running
Red: Tests failed
Green: Tests passed
You can find more information on how it works in this blog post.
It consists of
-
An inexpensive hardware USB device that resembles a traffic light and that can rest on your desk or be attached to the side of your monitor.
-
A software tool to control the hardware and decide which color light should be turned on.
The software is just a command line utility that takes the target color as
argument so is up to the programmer to invoke it in the appropriate place and
time so the Yellow lights is on while the test are executing, the Red light
turns on when the tests fail and Green light is turned on when the test pass.
This allows it be used with whatever language you like and whatever test framework/tool you prefer.
Note: if you build it, please send me a picture! I would love to see it.
The hardware is based on the popular atmega328p AVR microcontroller and a cheap USB-UART converter.
The src directory contains the firmware for the atmega328p and the host
code of the command line utility. Each directory has its own Makefile for
compilation.
It is assumed that you know how and can flash the firmware in the atmega328p.
Any cheap USB-UART converter will work.
First connect your AVR programmer to both the computer and the target chip, then build and flash the firmware:
$ cd src/firmware
$ make
$ make fuses
$ make flash
With the firmware already in the chip, build the circuit
Now you can get creative with the casing.
$ cd src/host
$ make
If you want it installed in your system run
$ sudo make install
Should be mostly the same as GNU/Linux users (?)
If you try please let me know, and if you make it work by tweaking it a bit, pull requests are welcome.
I feel sorry for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But if you port it and make it work, pull requests are very welcome!
Once you have your hardware ready and the host software installed (or the binary
in the directory you want to use it), you may run tddlight and see the
commands it provides.
The host software assumes the hardware is at /dev/ttyUSB0, but if it's not in
your case, just provide the path as the last argument, or export the
TDDLIGHT_COMPORT environment variable:
$ export TDDLIGHT_COMPORT = "/dev/ttyUSB1"
You can now attach a tddlight invocation in your tests. Take a look in the
samples directory to see how and to give it a first try. (If you can add a
sample for another programming language or improve the existing ones, please
send a pull request).
Just a though: If you work in a software company it would be really cool to build this with a larger form factor so it can sit in a corner of the office where everyone can see it. Then connect your continuous integration system to it so it reflects the state of the CI tests. How cool is that?