CTO, vice president of engineering, and founder, Agitar Agitar CTO and founder Alberto Savoia has a unique tool for testing code: lava lamps. On April Fools’ Day 2004, Savoia connected two lava lamps to his testing network. When code passed, the green lamp glowed. When it failed, the red lamp lit up. This bit of inspired silliness led to a concept Savoia calls XF (eXtreme Feedback), where everyone from the CEO to customers can see how code passes muster. XF ties into another innovation, “software agitation,” where code is shaken, rattled, and rolled at the unit level several times an hour. These ideas form the heart of Agitar’s Agitator and Management Dashboard tools, which recently won a Jolt Product Excellence Award. The former Google executive is on a mission to make unit testing the industry default. “We want to do for software quality what Google has done for search quality,” he says.Back to 2005 CTO 25 Award winners Software Development