Archive for the ‘Agile Development’ Category

Selenium Continuous Integration Runner

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

selenium At Common Sense Media I wanted to get some functional testing up and running that didn’t require a lot of user training for the QA folks. I also wanted those tests to run in our Rightscale/Amazon EC2 hosted Hudson continuous integration server. As a result I’ve published the:

Selenium Selenese Continuous Integration Runner

on GitHub in the hopes that it will save other people time when trying to get their Selenese tests running from a continuous integration server. It’s very simple but one thing I battled with was that I had to patch the selenium JAR to get it to work with Firefox 3.0. It should work fine in any continuous integration server regardless if it’s Hudson, Cruise, Cruise Control, Bamboo, etc.

The functional testing products I’ve used that drive a real browser include Test Complete (commercial), Selenium, and Watir. I think all 3 do a good job but one thing I like about Selenium is that it’s dirt simple to get a user productive with the Selenium IDE Firefox plugin. However, that benefit is also the most limiting factor of the Selenium IDE which is that to be able to re-open tests in Selenium IDE you have to save them as Selenese (which is the most limited of the testing languages that Selenium supports). Still, I think Selenese is a reasonable choice for a lot of organizations that need a moderately sophisticated functional test suite.

Posted in Agile Development, Continuous Integration, Java, Javascript, Quality Assurance, Software Engineering, Testing | 3 Comments »

5 things Ruby on Rails has that Java doesn’t

Monday, March 13th, 2006

After listening to this weeks Ruby on Rails podcast where Geoffrey Grosenbach interviewed Bruce Tate, it got me to thinking about why Ruby on Rails appeals to me. For me as a Java person, the real appeal of Ruby lies in Rails and here’s why: (more…)

Posted in AJAX, Agile Development, Java, Ruby, Software Engineering, Web | 3 Comments »

Behind Closed Doors

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

A great book I read recently from the Pragmatic Programmers is Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is either a manager or executive or aspiring to some form of a team leadership role! It lays out the day to day with a very realistic technical leadership role in an example company. It also shows how to apply some XP style planning to the prioritization and release planning process with a medium sized team.

My only complaint with the book is one sentence where they recommend feature boxed over time boxed releases which I generally disagree with.

Posted in Agile Development, Management | No Comments »

SMART objectives in moderation please

Thursday, January 12th, 2006

As a technology manager a big part of what I do is trying to help people do their jobs well. That includes removing obstacles, being an advocate when there is a problem, making sure the team is operating efficiently, ensuring people can usually work a normal day without overtime, and overall making sure they are happy and enthusiastic in their job.

Part of that process involves doing performance reviews to check-in a few times a year, get feedback from their colleagues, give raises (more…)

Posted in Agile Development, Management, Software Engineering | No Comments »

Time boxed versus feature boxed releases

Thursday, December 29th, 2005

There are pros and cons to both approaches:

1. Feature boxed releases allow you to focus on getting the features the business side needs in the release and getting them right. However feature boxing is more easily prone to scope creep, continually pushing the release date, and spending too much time getting a feature “just” right instead of getting it in front of customers.

2. Time boxed iterations continuously keep the organization focusing on what’s most important (more…)

Posted in Agile Development | 1 Comment »