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Jared Richardson’s talk titled “Build Teams, not Products,” in particular, was one of the best presentations I’ve ever witnessed. It was just one of those talks where all the points seem tautologic...
-Yev Bronshteyn |
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Quoting Watts Humphrey, "Developers are caught in a victim's mentality." We never think it's our fault, it's always somebody else's.
-Jared Richardson |
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Even though our group was already following many of the practices outlined in Ship It!, I believe the book paid for itself within the first day of purchase. When one considers the burn rate of a ty...
-Steve Mitchell |
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(Aug 26)
The first scheduled class for the NFJS One venture is now official! And we don't even have the website live yet. :)
This class will be a good mix of the "Why" as well as the "How". The goal is for you to leave the class with a different perspective on test automation as well as the practical tools to be effective. The target audience is developers who want to understand how test automation can help them, as well testers who want to dive. We'll cover enough material that a coding background isn't required, but you'll get more out of it if you do.
Register here.
Here's the course description.
Good test automation is like a good exercise routine. We all know we should have one, but most of us don't. This class provides the tools and information you need to jump start your testing efforts. We'll show you what's worked for us and how we've used test automation to keep projects on time and under budget while making developers and testers more effective.
A solid testing effort shortens the debugging cycle for developers, frees interactive testers up for more involved testing, and prevents bug regressions from derailing your project.
Make sure and register today for the Test Automation Training course offered by Jared Richardson & No Fluff Just Stuff on October 8-10th.
Training Session: Test Automation Training by Jared Richardson
Dates: October 8-10, 9:00 - 5:00 PM Wednesday - Friday
URL: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=166071
Location: Chantilly, VA
Venue: Hyatt Place - Dulles South
Pricing: $1,450/person, Special $50 UG Discount (use promo code:nfjsone50ug)
Early Bird: Above price good thru 9/26/08, after $1600/person
Registration Fee: Includes 3 Day Training, workbook, wireless internet, beverages & lunch daily
Requirement: You will need to provide your own laptop for the course.
Sponsored by: No Fluff Just Stuff - www.nofluffjuststuff.com
Topics covered in the class include:
- Proven test coverage strategies you can use today
- Hands on training with several popular free testing tools
- Best practices for creating solid tests that run on your desktop and the server
- Unit, package, Mock Client, and integration testing
- How to make testing a normal part of your team's ecosystem
- The role of continuous integration in testing
- The proper role of test coverage metrics
- Static code analysis as part of the testing process
- Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) as a testing tool
- Creating and re-staging your test environment
- Using machine virtualization to manage your testing environments
This class balances the practices and the principles to give you the tools you need as well as an understanding of why you should use them.
Day One
Testing strategies: creating culture and easy wins
Continuous Integration with Cruise Control
JUnit: An introduction
Practical unit testing
Test coverage with Cobertura
Day Two
Package level testing
Mock client testing
Environment re-staging with Ant and dbUnit
Mocking versus live code
Static code analysis with FindBugs and CPD
Day Three
Testing web UIs with Selenium
Creating robust GUI tests
DSLs leverage your testing expertise
Shared resource rules
Fearless change: testing and refactoring
Virtual Machines to manage environments with Virtual Box
Category: Misc
(Aug 20)
I'm currently w/o a Mac and existing on web mail interfaces... If I owe you mail and I haven't replied to you, I apologize! Your email is probably trapped in subfolder in Mac's backup image.
But I'll be live again soon. Someone's loaning me a MBP this weekend to bridge me through the September 15th Apple announcement. If Apple doesn't update the MacBook Pro line (as rumor says they will), I'll be very unhappy. :)
Category: Personal
(Aug 19)
Last week I was talking with a friend about a common ailment on development teams today. And it seems to be getting worse.
Perhaps you've seen it already in your shop. Once one person catches an STD, it seems to spread quickly.
STD, of course, stands for Shiny Things Development.
Oh cool! Check that out... it's new and cool. Let's include it in the product! Why? Umm... it solves some problem. And didn't I just say it's shiny and new?
How many shops have you met that have insane development infrastructures "just in case" things get crazy? Anytime the shop has a list of tools and libraries where every single one requires a specific version for anything to work, someone there has STD.
What's the problem with STD? It generally indicates a lack of discretion and promiscuous use of technology. Rather than saving yourself for something that actually works, you're chasing down every new product and technology. Sure, it might be fun to try out new stuff, but over time the fun is far outweighed by the problems. It's never fun in hindsight.
If your product stack is just as complicated to understand as your product is, you're infected. If team members can't get parts of the product working locally, you've got it too. Have you every patched a single toolkit locally? That's okay. When you've patched more than a dozen, it's not the rest of the world, it's you. Have you rewritten large parts of a new toolkit, just to get it working? And it never occurred to you to just dump the new tech? It's just a matter of time until parts start falling off.
But there's still hope. Unlike some human STDs, software STDs can be cured. It takes time and discipline. You'll have to step back and eliminate some of the more trendy technologies from your product. A few doses of YAGNI usually clears things up nicely.
Here are a few guidelines for spotting trendy ideas:
- you've patched anything locally because it just doesn't work
- an update to a toolkit always breaks the application
- you spend more time isolating which area a bug is in than you do fixing the bug
- you have a list of tech for new developers to install that usually doesn't get them up and running
How will you know when you've eliminated the problem? When new team members are up and running in a day. When you spend time adding features and supporting the product instead of trying to figure out whether the latest bug is in LDAP, the database, the application.
When someone introduces you to a cool new toolkit and you can only see the potential problems it can cause in it's zero point one state, then you're on the road to recovery.
Category: Agile
(Aug 13)
Next week I'll be starting an exciting new career opportunity. I'll be working with Jay Zimmerman and a few other key people to provide a "one source solution" for a variety of consulting and training services. The inspiration for the name comes from the No Fluff Just Stuff software symposiums that Jay started back in 2001 and I regularly participate in. The idea is to provide an additional level of superior service to companies who want private training or that last a few days building on the 90 minute presentations offered by a No Fluff Just Stuff show. There are many opportunities to take training to a deeper level and that's what we'll be providing as well as some public classes centered around agile testing, Ruby, and Rails classes very soon.
In addition we'll be organizing several regional Ruby conferences and Agile conferences. The Agile One and Ruby One events will be very similar in size and composition to the NFJS shows. Smaller numbers (capped at 250 attendees) to ensure a great level of interaction between the speakers and attendees.
It's been a busy year, and it's just going to get busier!
Category: Personal
(Aug 5)
Dave Klein, frequent NFJS attendee (who also works behind the scenes from time to time) started an NFJS Alumni group. If you've ever attended NFJS (or thought about attending), I'd encourage you check it out. It's brand new now, but should grow.
If I can speak for Dave (he created the group during one of my talks), the intention was to give people a way to extend the experience and discuss the talks, etc after the show. Maybe even discuss them with attendees from different cities, see what talks are hot this year, etc.
NFJS Alumni
Jared
Category: Misc
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