Refactoring PyChart

Published March 7th, 2012 Under Coding | Leave a Comment

PyChart is a very nice program for producing print quality graphs. This video explains how PyChart package was refactored in order to make a nice and clean API. This talk is focused on teaching refactoring methodology to beginner and intermediate level programmers. Read more

Functional Testing Tools in Python

Published February 15th, 2010 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment

As we become more efficient at producing web sites, inevitably the issue of quality (or lack thereof) can begin to slow the velocity at which implementation teams are able to move forward. Functional testing tools can help increase quality, bolster team confidence and keep things running smoothly. This panel will bring together the maintainers of several functional testing frameworks written in Python. The session will be split into three distinct parts:
1. A lightning talk style introduction to each framework.
2. A guided discussion around the application of each framework.
3. A question and answer session with the audience.

Slides of the presentation

Functional Testing of Desktop Applications

Published January 6th, 2010 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment

Many advocates of unit testing believe that testing desktop (GUI) applications is so difficult as to not be worth it. Not only is it possible, but ‘functional testing’ (testing an application from the point of view of the user) is an important part of an agile development process. This talk is based on my experience of testing a spreadsheet application. Whether you have drunk the agile kool-aid or not, functional testing can improve your application and your development processes. The basic topics covered are:
* Why test functionally (including some unexpected benefits)
* The processes and infrastructure around automated tests
* How to functionally test – general principles and specific examples
* Difficulties and fragilities – and how to minimize them

Slides of the presentation

Refactoring A Cyclomatic Complexity Script

Published December 23rd, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

An example of refactoring to clean up a python script.

Blog source of the video

Building an Automated QA Infrastructure using Open-Source Python Tools

Published December 21st, 2009 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment

The benefits of continuous test integration are well known. Setting up an infrastruture for this can be a lot of work. It involves integration with version control, automated product building and running of tests, reporting on results in an accessible way, code coverage measuring, and code analysis such as with lint-like tools. We discuss how to set up such an automatic QA system using extensible open source python tools. The focus will be on Buildbot, an open-source, Python-based continuous integration framework. Topics include a survey of the current best available open source software; testing code in languages other than python (and the benefits of using tools written in python in such a situation); strategies for extending these tools to meet custom needs, while avoiding maintainability and quality pitfalls; and special bonus details for QA of projects implemented in python specifically.

Presentation slides