Presenting at SD West 2009
Next week (March, 9-14) I will be presenting at SD West 2009. SD West is always a great conference and I highly recommend making the trip out to Santa Clara one year and checking it out. If you are fortunate enough to be making the trip this year I invite you to come to any of the three sessions I am giving.
Set your User Stories Free with Groovy’s easyb
Co-presenting with Andrew Glover
Leveraging user stories during application development enables intelligent handling of customer requirements without having to create deeply formalized requirement documents. What’s more, user stories are an excellent mechanism for availing the expertise of a customer in authoring an appropriate acceptance procedure, which logically ensures the goals of the user story have been fulfilled by development. By employing user stories, teams are able to respond faster to rapidly changing real-world requirements. Yet, automating story testing with most current tools, such as FIT and GreenPepper, for example, can be cumbersome to the point that these tools detract from the conversations (between stake-holders and development) that are a core aspect of user stories. With the emergence of dynamic languages that easily incorporate the creation of domain specific languages, new tools are materializing that more easily leverage users. One such tool is easyb, which is an open source Java based framework that provides a syntax for defining stories and scenarios in a concise manner that ends up staying out of the way such that development teams can more effectively collaborate with stake-holders while having a powerful framework for binding user stories to the system under test. These stories then more appropriately serve as a mechanism for validating a user conversation against the system over time.
Scaling Everest - Testing a Web Application
Testing web applications is notoriously difficult. Historically, this has been because of the interactive nature of web applications, the distribution inherent in the browser-server model, browser diversity, and framework specific issues. Because of these challenges, developing good tests for web applications is often expensive and those tests are often fragile and require ongoing effort to keep relevant. This session will demonstrate various tools, techniques, and strategies for creating cost-effective and maintainable tests for web applications while putting these to work in testing a live application. These tests will progressively scale higher up the application stack as we explore the trade-offs associated with testing at various levels, including: executing tests at the highest level of the application just inside the container boundary; executing test at the web framework level; executing tests as though you were a browser; executing tests through a real browser. Attendees will come away with a deeper understanding of tools and techniques which can be used to develop their own strategy for effectively conquering the web testing mountain.
Continuous Testing: TDD Turned Up To 12
Continuous Testing (CT) is a developer practice that involves automatically running tests after every change, even so much as a single statement. It gives you instant feedback about the semantic correctness of your code, just as modern IDE’s give you instant feedback about syntax errors. CT has a profound impact on the way we use TDD. This session will cover the history, theory, practice, and daily application of CT to real-world projects. First, we will cover the history and basics of Continuous Testing, discuss it’s application on different platforms, and the presenter’s ongoing experiences with CT on several systems. Then we’ll demo the practice using various languages and some open source continuous testing tools. Finally, we’ll wrap up with a discussion of where this practice might be headed.