From the monthly archives:

November 2008

Effective Functional Web Tests

November 27, 2008

Douglas Squirrel just posted about the issues he’s having with slow functional tests. My last big project was a large website that used Selenium for functional testing. I thought I’d share what worked:

Make damn sure that Selenium doesn’t spawn a new browser. If you use (for example) JUnit tests that call [...]

Read the full article →

CI Cage Fight – Cruise

November 25, 2008

Note: I’m not going to even pretend to be unbiased about this one. I used to work for these people. I was involved in hiring Chris, and I was involved in some early discussions about previous incarnations of this product.
Chris Read presented Cruise, from ThoughtWorks Studios. Loads of people think that this product [...]

Read the full article →

London Build and Deploy Job RSS Feed

November 24, 2008

Short story: I made an RSS feed for Build and Deploy jobs in London. I’m going to run it as a public service until January and see if it’s helped anyone. If I help one person find a job in that time, I’ll be very happy.
Long story: I get asked if I know [...]

Read the full article →

Too Agile

November 22, 2008

Easy to say the ‘A’ word. Harder to do.

Read the full article →

The Build Rosetta Stone

November 19, 2008
Thumbnail image for The Build Rosetta Stone

Update: I had some nice feedback from @jtf @nasrat and @cread, so I have pushed the source files to a git repository.
What’s the equivalent command to [some command in your usual build tool] in [some build tool that you're using now]? I found myself asking that question too often earlier this year, so I [...]

Read the full article →

CI Cage Fight – Hudson

November 18, 2008

The next installment in this series is Eric Lefevre presenting Hudson. Hudson is an open source CI server that has gained a fantastic amount of ground in the past year or two. Out of the box it has a pretty good feature set:

Distributed builds. You can declare a dependency on a particular [...]

Read the full article →

CI Cage Fight – CruiseControl

November 17, 2008

The second presentation at the CI Cage Fight was Paul Julius, talking about CruiseControl. I think of CruiseControl as the daddy (or at least an uncle) of Continuous Integration servers. It’s the oldest Java CI server that I know of. As an open source project I think it opened the way for [...]

Read the full article →

CI Cage Fight – build-o-matic

November 11, 2008

One of the sessions for Citcon Europe 2008 was Tom Sulston’s Continuous Integration Cage Fight. Seven geeks lined up to show off their CI prowess, and the first one in the cage was Ivan Moore with his CI server, build-o-matic.
Build-o-matic is an open source CI server written in Python. It’s classic open source [...]

Read the full article →