Sometimes a project integrates data from outside of the repository, so commit-based-CI alone isn't effective. New data could cause an error, which isn't noticed until the next code change is proposed, and the build breaks. Often a project will decide the build shouldn't break when the data is incorrect during regular development, and these validations are only enabled during betas and release candidates.

To keep notifications about this errors occurring, regular builds with these checks enabled are necessary. These problems in imported data need to be distributed to the appropriate team somehow.

A special CI build that fails is one option of notifying the team, but that isn't very informative, especially for teams that are not developers - they wont appreciate hunting down errors in CI logs. Ideally a steady stream of new problems are periodically posted to a online team room, such as IRC, Telegram, slack or gitter.

One example is translations stored in a web service like Pootle. Translations in Pootle are not committed automatically. Also translations can become broken by development, so constant monitoring is needed. Translation teams typically hang out on a team chat service.

The critical functionality is ensuring that the bot does not regularly repeat the same problem, unless configured to do so. It may take a while to find someone who knows how to fix the problem, or the number of problems may be too large to be regularly listed in the chat room.

Milestones

PREPARATION/BONDING

• The participant has merged an enhancement to cobot.

CODING PHASE 1

• A system exists that posts notices into a chat room for every new error that occurs, without duplicating notices.

CODING PHASE 2

CODING PHASE 3

• A system exists that engages contributors to pick up errors to be fixed.