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• Functional tests running slowly after upgrade to Rails 2.2

A project upgraded to Rails 2.2 which was previously able to complete its functional suite in under 300 seconds now takes a leisurely 6000 seconds to finish. Speculation about possible causes is welcomed. Meanwhile, I suspect ghosts.

UPDATE: apparently the functional tests were running slow due to memory swappage (the memory swappage, in turn, caused by ghosts, no doubt).

Interesting Things

• Rails 2.2 may break Selenium tests

Rails 2.2 continues its reign of terror by using ‘secure’ HTTP-only cookies by default that cannot be read or set via javascript. This can cause selenium tests that attempt to logout by deleting the client-side session cookie to fail. The fix is simple enough; add :session_http_only => false in the config.action_controller.session hash in environment.rb. Or, to simply turn it off for your testing environment (which means you’ll still get the benefit of secure cookies in production), you can add ActionController::Base.session_options[:session_http_only] = false in your test.rb file. Alternatively, you can add explicit logout calls to your selenium tests, but expect these to add considerable time to your selenium suite.

• FixtureScenarios and slow test suites

A pivot installed FixtureScenarios on a project and found that the addition of the plugin alone (with no configured fixtures) doubled the time the project’s test suites took to complete. FixtureScenarios are now dead to Adam. Dead!

• No Pivotal Breakfast tomorrow

Karen Tsui and Ling-Wen Chang tirelessly prepare the world-famous Pivotal breakfast each day and generally make the San Francisco office an awesome place to work. They’re finally taking a much deserved break tomorrow, so now is a wonderful time to publicly recognize their much appreciated work. Thanks, and happy holidays!

Help

• Helper tests failing after Rails 2.2 upgrade.

A project was upgraded to run on Rails 2.2 and now has a handful of hate for helper tests. The tests in question use a stub Controller to generate a template and end up getting some nil variables. cache_classes is off. Suggestions welcome.

Interesting Things

• Pivotal Tracker Team Strength Reminder

If team members are out sick or on vacation, you can adjust your team strength settings by clicking on the blue icon at the end of the current iterations release marker. This will recalculate your current iteration velocity accordingly.

• ‘flash’ Partials

It is bad form to name your partials ‘flash’, because they attempt to populate a flash variable which has the nasty side effect of blowing away your notification array. Naming a partial ‘phlash’ produces no adverse effects outside of looking a little silly. ‘shazzam’ and ‘booyakkasha’ are also acceptable although somewhat less descriptive.

• Capistrano and Git

A default deploy with capistrano and git appears to prefer using the local working set instead of the configured repo (in this case, github). This may end up surprising you a great deal if you do a deploy from a machine that isn’t an exact copy of HEAD. It was suggested that best practice is to deploy tags from a dedicated CI box rather than a development workstation.

• Ruby On Rails Noteworthy Applications

http://rubyonrails.org has a new design, and with it came a page of noteworthy apps running RoR. Are you a Pivotal client who’d like to see your site up there? Get in touch!

One project reported a problem with the enumeration mixin when upgrading to Rails 2.2. The problem was with the all method.

The enumerations mixin allows you to treat instances of your ActiveRecord models as though they were an enumeration of values.

The proposed solution is to switch to in memory enumeration instead of using ActiveRecord.