Musings of a Software Development Manager

Michael Feathers wrote a tough post recently on UI testing tools.
The fact of the matter is that UI based testing should be used for UIs: that’s it. You should not be testing your full application end-to-end through a UI Testing tool. First of all, that sort of testing couples some of the most important tests [...]

I came across a note of mine from last year on my baseline expectations for developers:

All code is checked into source control on an hourly basis or at most daily.
Every project has an automated build. (Maven, Ant)
All projects are setup in continuous integration (Hudson)
All code follows the current Java/Groovy coding standards.
Unit test coverage of [...]

Getting DSLs to be business readable is far less effort than business writable, but yields most of the benefits.
– Martin Fowler
Software transparency to business experts is a great goal. I’ve met plenty of sophisticated business users who at least could do some basic SQL and whip together lots of nice reports in Excel. [...]

I haven’t really spent a lot of time with RSpec since about the 0.5 release. I took a tutorial class with Dave Astels and got jazzed about the opportunity since they were really able to leverage Ruby to make a nice BDD framework. After using RSpec all JUnit test methods started including should. [...]

We’re still using Fitnesse and its coming in quite handy for testing over 100 edits on some code we inherited. I still wonder how much it will catch on. Jeremey Miller has been thinking along the same lines:
Long term, all the testing gurus I know of seem to be driving towards [...]

It’s been about 7-8 months since we started to serious pilot Fitnesse on a project. Looks like its turning the corner. Instead of developers driving it, the QA staff are starting to build out acceptance tests and add scenarios. It’s coming in very handy for testing a huge number of edits based [...]

After about 20 minutes of frustration watching Selenium tests fail to launch Firefox 2.0 sessions I found the culprit buried in the bottom of the Selenium RC FAQ:
There’s a bug (SRC-216) that prevents Firefox 2.0.0.1 or later from starting up in Selenium RC 0.9.0. Until the new version is released, please use a latest SNAPSHOT [...]

Tomorrow we’ll demonstrate Fitnesse tests for a complete 30 days of work to the whole team. We’ve piloted Fitnesse tests before for portions of a Sprint’s code, but never for an entire Sprint’s worth of work.
Our experience so far:

Some of the team is still having trouble understanding what Fitnesse is for. Responses have [...]

Lasse is writing a Manning book on practical TDD and acceptance testing for java developers.

I’m so excited I purchased the early access addition, signed up for the author forums, and started skimming the PDF of the first four chapters tonight. This is exactly the text my team and so many other java [...]

I’m not sure anyone else will find this of much use, but the following is a list of tools, frameworks and libraries we use currently:
Java Frameworks

JSF 1.0
MyFaces
AJAX Anywhere
Spring
Hibernate
iBATIS
JUnit
EasyMock
Log4J
JODA Time
Struts (Though just for one 3rd party app and some older applications)

Tools

RAD 6.0 (We’re a Websphere shop these days)
IntelliJ IDEA ( Was the editor of choice before [...]