I've been in a lot of programming shops in my days, some fostered an agile mindset, some less so.

One feature which aids agile development is having something which gives the team visible feedback to the overall state of the project. One major real-time status item is the state of the continuous integration testing.

You are doing continuous integration testing aren't you? There are good lightweight tools and services which make this easy, I use run>run>run to test my open source projects like RiCal every time I commit to its publicly visible repository on github. Run>run>run provides free service for public open source projects, and range of paid plans to suit just about any budget.

And that's just one option, it just happens to be the one I use.

The continuous "integration" testing mindset can also be seen fractally. In between commits, something like autotest out of the ZenTest gem, or the autospec variation which is part of RSpec, can keep a continuous eye on the state of your code as you change it.

Thinking back on some of those programming shops, a couple of them had something I really liked, they had adapted real traffic lights to show build test status. Google for traffic light and you'll find that you can get them for fairly reasonable prices.

Or you could build your own. For a smaller scale version, consider this miniature traffic light built by a maker for his kids using typical maker supplies like, an Altoids tin, a cigar box, some L.E.D.s and a minimal microcontroller. When I saw this yesterday, I immediately thought how cool it would be to hook this up to a computer for C.I. feedback.

A small "confession." Until recently, I had a green-red status light for RiCal in the sidebar of this blog, using Glenn Vanderburg's runcoderun-badges but had to turn it off temporarily when someone told me that the UI for commenting to the blog was no longer working.

It turns out that the badge (which uses JQuery), was fighting with the Prototype flavored Javascript. I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to fix using JQuery's noConflict function, I just need to find the time to try it and test it. For the time being it was more pragmatic just to remove the badge.

Of course the downside is that I once again have blogspam comments showing up for moderation, I'd been wondering where they went!