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Recent Entries
- CruiseControl 2.7.2 Released
- Introducing... State Coverage
- Go faster with dynamic languages, but for how long?
- Register for CITCON Denver
- Webinar: Making the Business Case for Continuous Integration and Testing
- Survey on Business Benefits of Unit Testing
- Continuous Integration at JaSST'08 Tokyo
- AgitarOne available as a downloadable eval!
- Hoorah for XSLT!
- Crap4j 1.1.6 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.
- Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick on April 9, 2008 12:01 AM
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?
more »- Posted by Ken Koster on March 31, 2008 12:41 PM
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!
- Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick on March 12, 2008 05:34 PM
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.- Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick on March 3, 2008 11:54 AM
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.
- Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick on January 28, 2008 03:58 PM
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.
- Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick on January 27, 2008 10:59 AM
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!
more »- Posted by ashish on January 16, 2008 03:54 PM
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.
- Posted by Kevin Lawrence on January 14, 2008 04:46 PM
Crap4j 1.1.6 is out. The new version features historical trends of CRAP metrics, and comparison by similarly tagged projects. Exciting!
- Posted by Bob Evans on January 8, 2008 12:06 PM
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!
- Posted by Kevin Lawrence on January 3, 2008 03:15 PM
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?
- Posted by Bob Evans on November 16, 2007 03:55 PM
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.
- Posted by Bob Evans on October 31, 2007 10:32 PM
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.
- Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick on October 25, 2007 01:12 PM
A new version of crap4j has been uploaded to it's new home at https://www.crap4j.org/!
Please check it out and give us your feedback!
- Posted by Bob Evans on October 24, 2007 04:14 PM
CITCON Europe 2007 Starts Today
CITCON Europe 2007 starts today in Brussels, Belgium. We're in a nice central location, very close the Brussels North train station. As an open space event everyone has the opportunity to propose a topic for discussion. The one I'm most interested in is talking about Crap4J and other ideas for metrics to spot bad code.
- Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick on October 18, 2007 11:59 PM
qu’ils mangent de la brioche
It is a curious fact that, if you say
Let them eat cake!
at an international gathering, the French-speaking people will have no idea what you are talking about. Even if you say it in French.
- Posted by Kevin Lawrence on October 15, 2007 10:03 AM
A History of Build Systems
In my younger days, before I knew any better, many projects I worked on compiled and published their software manually.
You'd type cc and then copy these bits over there and then zip that directory and post it to there.
Eventually, we figured out we could write little scripts to automate all the tedious bits and make it less fragile
and more repeatable.
One day, I discovered the discipline of daily builds and tools like make and my life got a whole lot better. Make gave us, in Elizabeth's handy phrase "a place to put things".
more »- Posted by Kevin Lawrence on October 13, 2007 04:37 PM
Elizabeth Hendrickson is a tremendous facilitator and a canny manipulator.
In Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini describes various techniques for making people do things that, if they were thinking clearly, they would otherwise not do because of lethargy, laziness, or because it would offend their better judgment.
One of those techniques is The Commitment Principle which was used on American POWs to great effect by the Chinese during the Korean War.
- Posted by Kevin Lawrence on October 13, 2007 12:34 PM
What Jar? NoClassDefFoundError
My normal response to a NoClassDefFoundError is to ask google. This generally gives me a thread I can follow and eventually solve the problem, but it isn't very efficient. It looks like a better solution would be the What Jar? website... if only there were more jars in the index.
Have some extra time on your hands? How about uploading a bunch of the jars to save me some time in the future? :)
- Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick on October 5, 2007 04:13 PM
Kevin says all the cool kids are doing it...
more »- Posted by Jeffrey Fredrick on October 5, 2007 03:25 PM
(See the Developer Testing Archives for older posts.)
Developer Testing:
1) For every software function created, however big or small, the developer also creates meaningful tests that can be automatically executed to verify that the software works correctly
2) The developer does not check in the software function before the tests for that function pass
3) The developer adds the tests to a repository of automated tests that verify that all parts of the integrated system function correctly
4) This collection of automated tests is frequently executed, and the team commits to keep the tests passing at every stage of the development cycle
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