Matt Wynne taking it one tea at a time
At the time I left Songkick, it took 1.5 hours to run all the cukes and rspec ‘unit’ tests on the big ball of Rails. We were already parallelising over a few in-house VMs at the time to make this manageable, but it still took 20 minutes or so to get feedback. After I left, …
Continue reading “Optimising a slow build? You’re solving the wrong problem”
I sometimes get asked whether it’s possible to use Cucumber to test performance. The way to do it is to specify concrete examples of scenarios that the system will find itself in under stress. For example: Given there are 100,000 users registered on the system When I create a new account Then I should be …
Okay I’m bored of this. I need to talk about it. I love to use Ruby, RSpec, Cucumber and Rails to do test-driven development, but my tools for running tests are just infuriatingly dumb. Here’s what I want: When a test fails, it should be kept on a list until it has been seen to …
It’s perfectly possible to write automated acceptance tests without using Cucumber. You can just write them in pure Ruby. Take this test for withdrawing cash from an ATM: Scenario: Attempt withdrawal using stolen card Given I have $100 in my account But my card is invalid When I request $50 Then my card should not …
Recently, I played a game with a team I was training which I called “Seven Truths of Test Automation”. I got each “truth” and wrote it on an index card and put it in a (blank) envelope. I got to the training room early and hid them around the room, not very well, so that …
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 …
At work, we have been practising something approximating Acceptance Test Driven Development now for several months. This means that pretty much every feature of the system that a user would expect to be there, has an automated test to ensure that it really is. It has given me a whole new perspective on the value …
Last weekend I was at CITCON Europe, a great opportunity to meet some of the leading minds in the agile software movement. One intriguing new term I heard a few times was “value fetish”. Let me try to explain what I think it means, and discuss the implications for agile teams.
The WatiN (Web Application Testing In .Net) framework, a port of the popular watir framework in ruby, has recently announced support for Firefox. This should make it a compelling alternative to selenium, especially as it looks to be a good deal quicker. Sweet. Now if only I had a way to serve up an ASP.NET …
My notes on DanNorth and JoeWalnes‘ session at Spa 2008. Five artefacts: Automation – the glue that binds the tests to the code Vocabulary – the language that the tests are expressed in Syntax – the technology that the tests are expressed in (C#, Java) Intent – the actual scenario being tested Harness – the …