Since moving off Windows as my development platform, git has probably been the greatest treat. A great, lightweight, self-contained and very well thought-out piece of software, it’s one of those rare tools that once you’ve used it for a while, you can’t image how you worked without it. A lot of great ruby tools are …
Author Archives: Matt
Scrabbling up the Learning Curve
A few months ago I was at the peak of my powers. I was leading a team of ten C# developers building a huge project on Microsoft’s .NET platform. I had been working on the Windows platform for years, and there was rarely a question from the team I couldn’t answer quickly and confidently, drawing …
Come to CITCON
Some people think there is no conference for those of us who care about CI and testing, but oh yes there is. As an avid reader of this blog, I know that you, like me, realise that continuous integration and testing are to software development what the spirit level and the plumb-line are to the …
Story Driven Development – Just Another *DD?
Bryan Helmkamp, who maintains the handy little library webrat, did a talk recently at GoRuCo 2008 which explains his experiences using RSpec plain-text stories to build ruby-on-rails applications in a manner he calls ‘Story Driven Development’: Before code is written, the team produces executable scenarios for a user story.
9 Techniques to Save you from the Bug-Swamp
How many unresolved bugs are there in your system right now? Yes, yes, smarty-pants: the ones you already know about. Ten? Fifty? Two hundred? More?! I find it frighteningly common to see teams let a huge backlog of bugs build up. They set up a trusted system like Jira or Bugzilla and then use it …
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Behaviour-Driving Routes in Rails with RSpec
One thing that isn’t documented very well for RSpec is how to test your routes. I came across an old post on the rspec mailing list which described a great way to do this: describe TasksController “routing” do it “should route POST request for /tasks to the ‘create’ action” do params_from(:post, “/tasks”).should == {:controller =>; …
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CCTray for Ubuntu?
If you or one of your team-mates uses ubuntu for their desktop, you might want to check out jccray by Ketan Padegaonkar. It may also be available with the main cruisecontrol source though it doesn’t appear to be there at the moment.
Are Use Cases Any Use?
On my last project, some joker took the (much maligned) paper file marked ‘Use Cases’ and gave it the more accurate title ‘Useless Cases’. We hated that file. It contained so much misinformation, so many gaps. Take heed though: Alistair Cockburn still thinks use cases are relevant. We certainly learned on that project that while …
Simple Check-In Quality Gate with GIT
For many moons I used to ponder on the challenge of how to get Visual Studio and TFS to stop developers from checking in code when the tests didn’t pass.
MySQL Ruby Gem Frustration with OS X
A few minutes ago I posted about the time I’d wasted since inadvertently upgrading my ruby version. My last hurdle was to install the mysql ruby gem, which is never easy on OS X, as I learned the first time around a few days ago. However this time, I was stumped. The gem seemed to …