Time Marches on...

May Day, May Day... It is the first of May and I along with the rest of the nation are looking for better days to come.
The last few weeks I have been working on Java code for a good friend of mine Bob Arasmith. Bob is a great guy and one of the best engineers I have ever worked with / for. Our friendship goes back more than 25 years (yea I know, we don't look that old) when we first met at Verbatim in 1983. But back to the subject of working with Java.
The first thing I that hit me is that although I have been around Java from a QA perspective since the early 1990s I really had not developed a serious application with it. Java is pretty straight forward I guess but after working with Ruby and Rails for the past 3 years Java feels a bit heavy. My first project was to parse some very large text files and create a database from the contents. This was definitely not rocket science but it did give me a good task to familiarize myself with Java. I am now working on a second project that will incorporate JSW or perhaps YAJSW for monitoring a collection of applications and services. Wish me luck.

By the way, I am still looking for consulting, contracting or a permanent position, any leads would be most welcome.

Cucuber and Selenium

In my latest contract I have been developing automated tests for a Rails application using Selenium and Cucumber. I was reasonably comfortable with Selenium, or so I thought but Cucumber was another story, no pun intended.

Cucumber allows you to define tests in natural language such as:
Given I am a valid user
When I log in
Then I should see my todo list


Pretty cool but the real beauty is in creating a DSL that lets you spit out tests nearly as fast as you can think of them. This is where the true benefit of Cucumber + Selenium really shines. Yes it takes significant time to build up the DSL but over time, you have a vocabulary that allows you to not only test the application but in true BDD form, specify it as well.

More to come over the next few weeks.