While at the agile 2009 conference last week Ben Rady and I sat down to figure out what we would need to do to get Infinitest working with Scala. To our delight it worked right out of the box! This is both a testament to the power of JVM based languages and the flexibility of Infinitest. Here is a quick screen cast I put together to show just how easy it is to use Infinitest with Scala.
Today Improving Works released version 5.0.51 of Infinitest for IntelliJ. This version includes IDE integrated support for SCM Green Hooks. A green hook is an Infinitest term for an action which is taken when your tests are run and all of them are passing (green). This SCM green hook will optionally perform an update from whatever source code repositories you have configured for your project when the passing state is reached. With this hook running you will not only be continuously testing your local copy of the project but will be continuously integrating and testing against the very latest state of your source code repository. Green? Go ahead and commit!
The screencast below explains this new feature and shows how to quickly get going with it.
Infinitest 5.0.26 has been released and is available for download from the IntelliJ repository. New features include:
Today the Infinitest team is pleased to announce the release of Infinitest for IntelliJ version 5.0.0. This new version includes two main features: gutter markers and a log tab. The updated plugin is available for download from the plugin manager within IntelliJ. Also, please check out our new and improved home page at http://www.infinitest.org.
Yesterday Jason Lee and I released our first version (0.1) of FacesTester, a test framework for JavaServer Faces applications. Jason has a great write-up on features included in this release on his blog at http://blogs.steeplesoft.com/facestester-01-released/ that I won’t repeat here. But I encourage you to give this tool a test drive if you’re a JSF developer looking for a solution to test driving your JSF code. The project is being hosted at Kenai where you can access our mailing issues, issue tracker, etc. We would appreciate any feedback you have.
For the last month or so I have been working on a test framework for JavaServer Faces applications with my friend Jason Lee. The goal of this framework, named FacesTester, is to enable the test driving of JSF applications. Earlier Jason announced FacesTester and today I’d like to illustrate one very simple example of how FacesTester can be used to specify a simple web interaction in a test driven manner.
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.
Earlier this week the Agile Journal published my article on continuous testing. Please check it out, I would love to hear any feedback you have on the article, CT, or Infinitest.
There are quite a few good tools available for developers who are interested in writing more expressive tests. Frequent readers of this blog will doubtless know that I am a big proponent of easyb which is a very effective groovy-based Behavior Driven Development (BDD) tool. But what if your organization doesn’t support the use of Groovy or you are not fortunate enough to use the IntelliJ IDE (for which easyb has direct support for)? Other popular tools in this vein include Fit, Fitnesse, GreenPepper, RSpec, and Concordian among others. These all share a desire to more expressively represent system behavior in an automated manner. But like all tools, they have their own challenges as well. They all introduce their own syntax for expressing behavior which can make writing specs more cumbersome. And they all require special methods for running them introducing very real tooling issues. In this brief post I will introduce how you can begin to write more expressive BDD-styled tests through JUnit, and how the JUnit-based BDD tool JDave can help you find some of the expressiveness offered by the tools listed above without having to venture out beyond the ubiquitous JUnit platform.
Nowadays everyone is looking for better ways of doing more with less. Companies are reducing staff, slashing budgets, and deferring major new investments while those remaining are left to shoulder the added burden created by these cuts. I believe that in order for software development teams to successfully meet these challenges they need to continue to find new and innovation ways of applying disciplined software development practices to their craft. Project automation, continuous integration, unit testing, test/behavior driven development, and continuous testing are practices that should be a part of every software developer’s arsenal.
These are all topics that I’m passionate about sharing with others and for a very limited time I am offering free 2-4 hour consulting sessions to explore any of these areas with you and/or your company, no strings attached! For companies in the DFW Metroplex I would be happy to come to you to run a brown-bag session, talk about any challenges you’re experiencing or questions you my have, or even pull up a chair and do a little bit of pair programming. If you’re outside of DFW I would be happy to talk on the phone or run a web-based presentation for you.
What I hope to get out of this is simple: opportunities to talk with others about areas that I find interesting, to run through presentations I will be giving at industry events later in the year, and to forge new relationships with people and companies. So if you’re interested in taking me up on this offer then please feel free to contact me by email at rod.coffin@improvingenterprises.com.