Last week my pair and I ran into a problem with a failing Cucumber scenario. We were using one of the more awesome features of Cucumber, multiline tables, when we got the unexpected failure. We realized that what we were doing was probably a common pattern and would certain trip other’s up.
Tonight I had the privilege of giving a presentation on Test Driven Development to the ASUSoDA group at ASU. I focused on a higher level aspect of testing and the benefits and pitfalls of TDD. After my planned presentation I was also able to demo my Intern Management App which was fun given the lighthearted nature of the examples.
RSpec, Cucumber, Webrat, RCov and Autotest are a powerful combination of tools for testing your Rails app. Unfortunately getting them to all work nicely together can be a bit of challenge. I recently configured a development environment from scratch on OS X 10.5 Leopard and kept track of all of the little details.
Do you remember watching the FAIL Monster on Sesame Street? Never heard of the FAIL Monster? Weird, I’m pretty sure he was Cookie Monster’s cousin or something. He would pop-up and sing a little song about your failures and then at the end he would go crazy and NOM NOM NOM all of your excuses. The really strange thing is that when I grew up, I still saw the FAIL Monster, except he was all over, eating up everyone’s excuses, not just mine. When was the last time the FAIL Monster paid you a visit?
I’ve been working at Integrum for nearly 5 months now. When I started agile was a concept that I had read about, but never experienced in practice. I took bits and pieces of advice from books like Extreme Programming Explained and Practices of an Agile Developer but I had never really lived day-in day-out as a developer in an agile workplace. However, now that I’ve experienced the project boards, burn down charts, velocities and story workshops, I cannot imagine going back to the slam-your-head-against-the-wall waterfall approach from which I came.
Shared example groups are a great feature of Rspec that help you simplify your tests and keep your code DRY. You setup shared example groups almost exactly like you would a regular set of specs, but these similarities can be slightly misleading.
Here’s a quick fix for the “Remote host said: 554 too many hops, this message is looping (#5.4.6)” error message you might get when trying to send an e-mail to an e-mail address configured in PLESK on a GoDaddy Linux VPS running Qmail.
Last week at Integrum, as part of our ongoing effort to be the best, we had a retrospective/company-wide expectation meeting. We discussed our current processes, and outlined some new things we wanted to do going forward that would help improve everything we do. Even though we talked a lot about project boards and velocities, when it comes down to it, it’s really all about the people.
I’m a fan of Flog. I like using it every now and then to make sure that I’m not getting too complex, trying to be clever, or setting myself up for testing failure. Typically these are things I look to my MILF slaying pair for guidance, but sometimes Flog can be just as good.
Looking for a really confusing and cryptic layout language for generating PDFs through your rails app? If you enjoy nonsensical markup languages and have the urge to read poorly written how-to documents from 1995, say hello to LaTeX! Unfortunately LaTeX can be slightly difficult to configure, but with a little help from apt-get, you can make your life easier.
