Air Horn

One client I worked at had an interesting technique for getting everyone's attention immediately. The environment was a good-sized CubicleFarm? for two dozen programmers, managers, and database administrators, that was only partially built up; the other half was completely empty. This area was used for the daily StandUpMeeting. Every day at 3pm, the ProjectManager blew the AirHorn, and like HerbertGeorgeWells' Eloi, all of the programmers immediately stopped what they were doing, to attend the meeting.

One morning, someone accidentally blew away the ConcurrentVersionsSystem repository, and the backup was (for some reason, possibly political) not readily available. The manager blew the horn, everybody gathered, the situation was explained. The developer with the most recent checkout was identified, and the repository was restored enough that the developers could keep on working. Only 15 minutes were lost in the process. -- JoeVigneau

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