Kelly Felkins's blog
Interesting
- "JsUnit has been updated" A new feature available on trunk is a "modern" ui. The modern ui has 2 panes, with errors and failures listed on the left. Clicking on an error displays details on the right. Get this by 1) installing trunk, and 2) specifying "ui=modern" as a parameter.
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- help: "Selecting an iframe with Selenium RC fu" It appears that selenium has the ability to select an iframe, but it doesn't work in selenium rc fu.
- answer: Apparently the selenium provided in selenium rc fu is an older version
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- "RSpec only Hoe?" How do you convince Hoe to only run specs and not tests?
- In the distance a dog barks...
- "Is there a fun way to learn Ruby?" I have a 500 page book, but is there a fun way to learn Ruby?
- (various pivots look at each other) "Pairing...of course"
- "Use RSpec to verify deployment?" Previously I used Rspec with JRuby to create stories for a java project. It would be nice to have a deployment story. The plan would say "apache goes here", "mongrel goes there", "mysql goes over there". You could show the plan to your customer printed on a piece of paper and you could run it to do the deployment.
- Capistrano can provide some of this vision.
Interesting Things
- Interesting things were all about internal Pivotal Labs activities this week.
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Window.frames['name']If we add a frame, then remove it, then add it again, it's still there.- [silence]
"What's that gem that draws a graph of your models?"
Selenium RC Fu is a fantastic system for testing Ruby On Rails applications. It is the blending of xUnit testing with Selenium. Selenium is a cool system that operates your browser as if a human were sitting there moving the mouse pressing buttons and keys.
Selenium RC Fu is also a remarkable example of the power of open source. It's selenium remotely controlled by rails and ruby. You can learn more about it by viewing the slides for Full-stack webapp testing with Selenium and Rails presented by my colleagues Alex Chaffee and Brian Takita at the SDForum Silicon Valley Ruby Conference.
Now that you are excited about Selenium RC Fu, by law I must inform you that this wonderful testing tool comes with some costs. First, this is the daisy cutter of testing -- problems will be detected, but it won't be too specific about those problems. A failed selenium test will likely only tell you some expected text was not present on the page -- you have to do some digging to discover the real problem.
It's also slow. To be fair, a lot of software is running to do this testing.
So use selenium testing sparingly. A good strategy is to restrict selenium testing to "happy path" testing. These happy path tests become a compliment to other more focused and faster unit and integration tests.
Recently I was about to check in some changes and did a last minute click through of the application. All of a sudden I'm staring at a stack trace. My tests were green and I had functional tests for the failing controller/action.
Tests are like pants -- they cover your backside while you focus on other things like adding features to your application. Suddenly I felt a breeze on my cheeks. Something was amiss.