The Loaf of Questionable Freshness

Summary - Some practices are meant to catch problems before they get too far. Don't make the mistake of having these practices humiliate or punish people.  Assume they are human, didn't mean it and have some shared laughs.
---
The practices collected in Gear Up! come from decades of experience, some painful, some that turned out fun in the long run.

One such practice called “Lighten the Mood” came from the development of Midtown Madness in the late nineties at Angel Studios when we were struggling to keep the game from being continually broken.

Often when a commit breaks a game, it's because someone ignored established testing practices.   We didn’t have extensive build testing automation then. We had a dedicated PC, the “build monkey,” where any change committed had to be tested separately following every commit. Verifying the build on the build monkey could be a tedious task. Some people occasionally found excuses to skip it, sometimes to the detriment of the team.

After a while, I thought of a cure. I purchased a loaf of Wonder bread, and we instituted a new practice: If you broke the build monkey, you had to host the loaf of bread on top of your monitor (everyone had CRT monitors back then, with plenty of warm space on top) until someone else broke the monkey and took ownership of the loaf.

At first things didn’t change. At first, no one seemed to mind a loaf of bread on their monitor. However, as time passed, this changed; the bread became stale and then moldy. Someone on the team started calling it “The Loaf of Questionable Freshness.” Eventually, we all desperately wanted to avoid being the owner of the loaf. As a result, build discipline improved, the monkey stayed unbroken, and eventually the loaf of questionable freshness was given a proper burial.

Technology has changed these practices a bit (in other words, we can’t fit a loaf of bread on top of an LCD monitor). These days automated test tools play embarrassing music, or the team holds impromptu ceremonies for team members who break the build (have you ever come back to your workspace to find it completely wrapped in in Saran wrap?). It’s all done with a sense of fun, which is what the Lighten the Mood practice emphasizes.

Read more about this practices and many more.