As I heard it, one of the late-nineties projects at Microsoft had a big problem with build breakages. They finally instituted a policy of tracking down every build breakage, and conducting a little humiliation ritual of awarding the offender a "big sucker" award at the weekly project meeting. This award had to be displayed on the developer's office door for a week or something.

You could dodge the award even if you did break the build by showing that you had run the full unit test suite before you submitted your code.

Yeah. We considered that but that's horrible social solution for purely technical problem. It's like beating your child so he won't put fingers in the wall socket instead of childproofing it.

One shouldn't make a big deal about it, but something like "whoever breaks the build on an important branch (and doesn't immediately remember and reverts it) brings cookies/makes a coffee run/... for everybody in the same office" can work if it happens to often. You are right, occasional mistakes happen, so it has to be something simple.

Personally I don't think any team is disciplined enough to ALWAYS do it manually and the con-founder of "it works on my machine".

I wouldn't say undisciplined, just human. If you can not do something you from time to time won't do it.