A few months ago, I messed up a cross-component check-in and broke the build. I’m not proud of it. (In my excitement over finally having passed a few weeks’ worth of testing requirements, I absently submitted only one of the components for check-in! My change was 99% within one component, and I forgot about the other 1%.) My submission cleared the “single-component check-in” queue at around 4:30am, and before I got a chance to fix the problem at 8am, a complex job was submitted into the “multi-component check-in” queue. That job failed, of course, because I neglected to update the second component.

A few hours later, I was greeted with a large inflatable bunny rabbit (looks similar to this guy) in my office. His name is “Bug Bunny”, and it is my lot to be Bug’s keeper until somebody else breaks the build. (But hey, at least I fixed it before 5pm. At 5pm, my team’s lab kicks off its nightly builds, and if you break those builds, the next morning’s “official team build” doesn’t get released, and testers don’t have anything to install.)

I suspect many groups have an object with a similar purpose, namely to be “bestowed upon” the person who most recently messed up.