Developer Testing (Atom)

CruiseControl 2.7.2 Released

CruiseControl 2.7.2 is available for download.

Lots of bug fixes, lots of changes to the Dashboard.

New plugins:

Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks Store Source Control
Git Source Control & Bootstrapper
Http Publisher
Mercurial Source Control & Bootstrapper
SVNLabelIncrementer

See detailed release notes here.

Introducing... State Coverage

The other software metric to come out of Agitar, CRAP is simply too much fun. So David Kao (a former Agitar intern) and I decided to take the levity down a notch.* The result?

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Go faster with dynamic languages, but for how long?

There's a lot to be said for dynamic languages. With Ruby, PHP, Python, and the rest of the gang, developers can write less code, and sometimes end up with some pretty nice looking code too. I've tried my hand at some PHP, and I must say that PHP arrays really cut down on the keystrokes compared to Collections in everybody's favorite punching bag, Java. But how long can this warm-and-fuzzy feeling last?

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Register for CITCON Denver

CITCON Denver is just around the corner, April 4th and 5th. This the 3rd annual CITCON North America event, the previous years having been in Chicago (2006) and Dallas (2007). CITCON events have also been held in London (2006), Sydney (2007) and Brussels (2007).

For those who haven't heard about it CITCON is the Continuous Integration and Testing CONference, an open spaces (or "unconference") event that attracts an energetic and enthusiastic crowd of CIT practitioners from around the US, Europe and Asia. If you've never been to an open spaces event you can think of it as the best part of a normal conference -- the hallway conversation -- dialed up to 11!

You can read about past CITCONs on the wiki and then register today. But hurry, there are already 120 people registered and only 30 more registrations will be accepted!

If you can't make it to Denver then you might want to plan ahead by registering now for CITCON Melbourne in June or CITCON Amsterdam in October. Or maybe even all three!

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Webinar: Making the Business Case for Continuous Integration and Testing

This week on Wednesday March 5th I'll be giving a webinar on Making the Business Case for Continuous Integration and Testing. This webinar is a bit different than previous ones I've given on CIT. I wanted to address this topic because I've talked to a number of people at places like CITCON who believed that CIT was the right thing to be doing but they were inexplicably (to them) unable to convince others that continuous integration and the automated testing that goes with it were something worth investing in. So to try and help people I've put together what I see as the most compelling information and also some advice on how to tailor your case based on specific situation in your company. Following the slide portion of the webinar I'm going to answer questions from the audience. In addition to questions about the slides I'm also interested in hearing from people who've encountered obstacles in adopting CIT and I'll try and provide specific suggestions for getting around the problems. If you're interested in this material you can register for this webinar today.]]> Read the full blog entry

Survey on Business Benefits of Unit Testing

Artur Hildebrandt is a MBA student at the University of Liverpool and currently running a survey on the business benefits and risks of unit testing. His goal is to identify and measure benefits software development organizations can gain by actively practicing unit testing. I think it would be great to have more information available to persuade management on the benefits of unit testing so I'm happy to promote his survey. If you'd like to take part his questionnaire available at online.

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Continuous Integration at JaSST'08 Tokyo

I'm sitting here in SFO waiting for my flight to Tokyo. I'll be speaking this week at JaSST, the Japanese Symposium on Software Testing. This will be a bit different from my normal talks on CI because I'll be focusing on the benefits of CI for testing groups rather than my normal focus on developers. And there will be translation into Japanese which makes for a very different presentation experience. But I'm very excited about giving this talk because Continuous Integration is less well known in Japan than in Europe, Australia or the US, so it will be fun to be bringing the message to a new audience.

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AgitarOne available as a downloadable eval!

Several prospects and friends in the software development business have asked us to make a downloadable eval for AgitarOne available on our web site. It is finally here!

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Hoorah for XSLT!

It would be handy to have a report of all the unexpected exceptions that get thrown.

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard that. I've even said it myself a few times.

It seemed like it would be pretty easy to do using the dashboard.xml feature of AgitarOne, so I decided to give it a try.

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Crap4j 1.1.6 Released

Crap4j 1.1.6 is out. The new version features historical trends of CRAP metrics, and comparison by similarly tagged projects. Exciting!

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JUnit Factory is a Jolt Award Finalist!

First we generate over a million free JUnit tests and then we get nominated for a Jolt Award.

What a great end to the first year of JUnit Factory!

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Flock let's you blog directly from the browser?

Well - here's my test of blogging to our MT site directly from the flock browser. If it does go through - then that's amazing - good work by the flock folks.

If you don't know what i'm talking about - check out http://www.flock.com/

Also, if this works, hopefully I'll be able to write more here, since the blog button is only a Ctrl-Shift-B away!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, mt, blog

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Configuring CruiseControl the CruiseControl Way

Configuring CruiseControl the CruiseControl way from ThoughtWorks Studios presents what should be a standard practice. Checking your cruisecontrol configurations into version control and having cruisecontrol bootstrap with them.

Now I could see it getting tricky if you have multiple build machines, but it seems like that would be pretty easy to handle as well by using different config files for different machines, or something similar. That might violate the DRY principle, so it would be good to think a little more about it. How do others deal with this?

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Crap4j v1.1.4 Released, Available as an Ant Task now

Like the title says.

This is particularly exciting because now it can be included in continuous integration setups.

One natural next step would be to set a threshold value so that crap4j would throw an error that would fail the build. I would be curious to hear comments on how people would like that to work.

Anyway, find out how to get the latest version at the blog.

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Visualizing Complexity and Coverage

At CITCON Europe in Brussels last week one of the sessions I enjoyed was on CRAP4J and other metrics for bad code. (I've put my notes up on the CITCON wiki.) Today Kevin reminded me that Clover has a similar metric for identifying risky code, a tag cloud that uses complexity to size the tag and the coverage level to color it. They have posted a sample using Lucene here. This is a pretty neat looking approach... but honestly? I don't really like it.

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