How We Build Quality Software at uSwitch.com
Published November 25th, 2009 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment
This video provides an experience report on how we build quality software at uSwitch.com. Around 9 months ago the development team shifted from having a separate QA team to adopting a whole-team approach for building and delivering software with quality baked in. This talk explains why we made this shift, provide an insight into how we achieved it from a people and process point of view and delve into tooling. It includes:
- Why testing along the production line is better than testing end-of-cycle.
- How we make sure we get thorough acceptance criteria up front, before we start development.
- How we automate execution of acceptance criteria with cucumber and watir.
- How we run these continuously in TeamCity.
- Why we stopped using QTP and Selenium.
- How our developers learnt to think like testers.
- Why we stopped using the words ‘tester’ and ‘testing’.
- The importance of BDD for writing testable code.
- How kanban principles help radiate information on development and provide tracking and reporting on quality.
- Peripheral activities that help us continuously release quickly and confidently.
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-testing/how-we-build-quality-software-at-uswitch-com
Cucumbered
Published November 11th, 2009 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment
In this talk from FutureRuby, Joseph Wilk gives an introduction to the BDD framework Cucumber and gives valuable tips for getting it adopted and used by customers and developers. Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid – all rolled into one format.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/wilk-cucumber
Outside-in development with Ubuntu
Published July 16th, 2009 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment
This is a demo of how I’d like to be able to do Behaviour-driven development (from the outside-in) on Ubuntu using stories and automated testing. The story-part is already possible with cucumber – but it’d be nice to be able to use Python right? And the automated testing would use the new notification system in Ubuntu Jaunty (in the way that growl + rspactor is used on the mac) – AFAICS this should be possible already, we just need easy configuration etc.
BDD with Cucumber
Published May 12th, 2009 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment
Cucumber is a BDD tool that aids in outside-in development by executing plain-text features/stories as automated acceptance tests. Written in conjunction with the stakeholder, these Cucumber “features” clearly articulate business value and also serve as a practical guide throughout the development process: by explicitly outlining the expected outcomes of various scenarios developers know both where to begin and when they are finished. This video presents the basic usage of Cucumber, primarily in the context of web applications, which will include a survey of the common tools used for in-memory and in-browser testing. Common questions and pitfalls that arise will also be discussed.
Cucumber and Watir 101
Published May 7th, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment
Dave Hoover demonstrates how to use Watir with Cucumber. Actually, he uses his own library SafariWatir, but you could easily swap it with Watir, FireWatir, ChromeWatir or Celerity. Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid – all rolled into one format. Sorry – no sound.