act:ualise | technology

As a long time user and advocate of Selenium I have found that using it on large projects ultimately consumes a lot of time with the following concerns:

Organising tests into logical groups
Executing testcases against multiple target browsers
Parallel execution of testcases

The motivation for these is to speed development; as the number of tests grow you eventually hit [...]

I recently figured out how to use WebTest for functional testing of Grails controller actions that render JSON. That said, I’m not convinced it’s the best way – I’m fairly sure the gFunc plugin would do it nicely, though I ran into problems with it clean compiling the whole app on every run.
Custom steps
It’s been [...]

The No Fluff, Just Stuff 2009 Tour rolls into Seattle on September 18-20th. The line-up has some interesting speakers:

Brian Goetz, Author of Java Concurrency in Practice
Brian Sletten, REST Expert
David Geary, Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF
Howard Lewis Ship, Creator of Tapestry and HiveMind
Ken Sipe, Technology Director, Perficient, Inc. (PRFT)
Mark Richards, SOA and [...]

Spring has sprung and with that hails the first Vancouver Groovy and Grails meet of the year.
Time:
Monday 30th March, 18:00
Place:
WorkSpace @ 21 Water Street in Gastown, #400
Topics under the spotlight this time round are twofold:

EasyB: BDD For Groovy & Grails (Jerome Pimmel)

EasyB leverages the Groovy language with a simple readable DSL for writing BDD [...]

For those using Grails 1.1 already there’s a new command line argument for testing which re-runs only tests which previously failed.
grails test-app -rerun
Thanks to @wangjammer5

Gus Power and Kris Lander of EnergizedWork just presented ‘No Excuses: Concept to Cash Every Week‘ at QCon London which highlights the manner by which development is executed within the EnergizedWork stable. 
It’s worth reviewing the slides (available via ‘No Excuses’ link above) to get a sense of how using such methods can help achieve the [...]

Following my previous post I discovered a very helpful email in my inbox from Johannes Link, the author of MockMe, who provided an example of using MockMe to unit test my PrototypeJS classes.
One of the benefits of MockMe, vs JSMock or Jack, is it’s observance of the 3-A’s pattern (Arrange Act Assert), I quote:

Arrange is [...]

I’ve long been used to having decent testing frameworks in Java / Groovy / Grails however its taken me a while to stumble upon similar ways to test in Javascript. I tried my hand at using JSMock and then tried MockMe. They both seem very capable but I wanted something quick to test a class [...]

I was so open-mouthed with amazement at this post by Uncle Bob that I had to re-post! 
I know Joel Spolsky has a lot of followers so you would expect statements like “Quality doesn’t matter that much” to be backed by something substantive; Uncle Bob lays right in with a swingeing assault (go Bob!).

For the past few years myself and colleagues have used Selenium extensively to test-drive (and continuously test) all the web-apps which we’ve collectively been responsible for. In that time our massed experience meant we got pretty slick at writing these tests. Then when I started on a new project with a new team, I realised [...]