If you’re using the latest version of RubyMine (2.0.2) with the latest version of Cucumber (actually anything above 0.7), you’ll probably see this ugly warning when you try to run your cukes from within the IDE: The bug has been logged, and there’s a published workaround, but I wanted something a bit easier to use. …
Author Archives: Matt
Belly Wants to Eat Your Tests
Ever since I lead the team at Songkick through an Acceptance-Test-Driven re-write of their gorgeous web-ui, I’ve been thinking about problem of scaling a large suite of acceptance tests. By the time I left Songkick for the wilds of Scotland, it would take over 3 hours to run all the Cucumber tests on a single …
Battling Robots at Software Craftsmanship 2010
I’ve submitted a session for the Software Craftsmanship 2010 Conference. It’s a redux of the Robot Tournament I ran at SPA2010. The idea behind the session is to simulate the life of a start-up software company. In the early rounds of the tournament, the priority for each team is to get a robot, any robot, …
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Hi-Fidelity Project Management
If the only metric you use for measuring and forecasting your team’s progress is their iteration velocity, you’re missing out on a great deal of richer information that, for just a few extra minutes per day, you could easily be collecting. This is information that the team can use during the iteration to help spot …
Installing mysql gem on Mac OSX Snow Leopard
This old chore doesn’t seem to have become any easier lately. Here’s how to do it: http://blog.simb.net/2009/10/24/gem-mysql-with-mysql-5-1-on-snow-leopard/
Random Notes from SPA2010
Usage-Centric Design Narrative Journey Maps Duncan Prefers the term Usage-Centred Design to User-Centric Design. There was a book reference here but I missed it. Narrative Journey Maps (NJM) are a way to model and visualise the steps a user has to follow as they try to achieve a goal. Each Step is decorated with: Comments …
Fancy a Game of Robots?
I’m running a session next week at the SPA conference where we’re going to have a battle between rival teams of programmers. I’ve been working on the tournament engine for the past few weeks and really picked up pace on it this week. I hadn’t realised it would be so much work! The thing is, …
Agile North 2010
I’ll be speaking at Agile North this year. The title of my talk is “The Lean Startup”, in which I’ll describe my experiences with an incredible young company I’ve been working with for the last couple of years. Here’s some more details about the conference: Friday 14th May 2010 – UCLan, Preston Price held at …
MegaMutex: A Distributed Mutex for Ruby
Sometimes I need to do this: unless enough_widgets? make_more_widgets end Which is all well and good, until I start letting two or more of these codes run in parallel. If you’ve never thought about this before, what can happen is something nasty called a race condition, where two or more processes (or threads) simultaneously check …
Agile 2009 Session – Debugging Pair Programming – Part 1
I had the chance to run a 90 minute session at this year’s Agile Conference in Chicago. The conference as a whole was an terrific experience but here I’d like to talk about my session, and what I learned from it. The session focusses on the barriers that prevent people from adopting pair programming. I’ve …
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