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I was away on vacation this week and when ever I go away the week is eventful, I came back to the news that Phil Haack has taken the red pill and James\Brad have been busy. My congrats to Phil on his news, I look foward to working with Phil as part of the ASP Insiders. James and Brads (met Brad last year, not sure if Brad remembers but he's a nice guy) new framework, xUnit.net is an interesting addition to the current set of test frameworks in .NET land. Roy, Scott and Bill all have views and Brad has addressed some questions and I'll let you look there for further information. I'll add my thoughts on XUnit only where MbUnit is involved, I'll start with Bill's points first. Like Roy, I'm not about to jump on this bandwagon and I don't suggest you do either. If you're looking to start writing new tests with it, I guess it's okay (other than the things mentioned above) but that's for you to decide. If you're looking to replace NUnit or MbUnit with XUnit.NET forget it. It's not worth it as Read More...
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I based this post from a post by Sebastien Pouliot , I was so thrilled that I wanted to write it up here. Chris Gameweld was a student on this years Mono SoC project and has worked on creating a tool to improve the unit test coverage within the Mono code base . The end result was a tool called FieldStat that checks the frequency of how often methods are called, when used with code coverage results in a test you can see where tests need be shored up. Chris has an interesting proposal . An approach for favoring the important but uncovered code involves an algorithm that is capable of ranking the importance of code. CodeRank is a technique that is similar in spirit with Google’s PageRank –- important methods link to other important methods. The CodeRank creates an ordered ranking of all the methods where each rating assigned to a method gives its relative percent importance. This rating can be scaled by other factors including call frequency. FieldStat is using CodeRank and producing some Read More...
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Some lightly older guides knocking about on the web, the easiest way of adding MbUnit to CCNet is to change the XSL reports (you can try the plugin option if you want). As noted in an earlier post, the XSL to show MbUnit reports is shipped with CCNet so you will have everything you need. I will get this into the docs I promise but for now here is a quick guide. Get MbUnit reports into CCNet. You will need to ensure that MbUnit is reporting to XML (you can use either the msbuild, nant or console tasks for this) and is merged into the CCNet XML by changing the ccnet.config and your projects MERGE group. Use MbUnit XSL When this is done you will need to change CCNet to use MbUnit XSL over the default NUnit XSL. You will need to make this change for the webdashboard and the server. There two ways of doing this, the easiest is to rename files (in the XSL folder) as follows. unitests.xsl to unitests2.xsl MbUnitSummary.xsl to unitests.xsl tests.xsl to tests2.xsl MbUnitDetails.xsl to tests.xsl Read More...
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I upgraded our CCNet CI server to 1.3 today . I also noticed that Eden has updated his CCNet stat upgrades to use a nice looking Dojo package . If your collecting CCNet stats on your box then this upgrade is well worth adding (and easy too but beware of IIS caching). Read More...
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Its rare that folks travel with out a map, even those in the outback have mental map of where they going (and its not like norman briggs from new york is doing the walk about, he would be croc food very quickly). So would you code before having any idea of what your doing? You must have at least have a vage idea, it needs to do XYZ but unless you know 100% what XYZ are then that means lots of room for movement on what XYZ is from your customer (could be your boss for example) and the time it took you to develop XYZ goes up and up each time XYZ changes and up and up Thats a costly business but at the the other end of the scale it be costly too. In some organizations, change control is a serious busines (windows start button any one ;-)) with lots of levels of consideration of impact (big design up front approaches can glue this in). In other organizations there is non, it just happens (ad-hoc). In others the methodology can flex to the requirements. What does this mean exactly? Well in the Read More...
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Here is a question, how much time did you spend in the debugger today? Lets say for a 10 hour project you spend on average 1 minute of every hour in the debugger. Of course this is a guess, if your writing code from scatch then you won't spend as often in the debugger as you aready have a mental node of where you need to set watches and breakpoints. Come back to that code in 6 months or debug someone elses code and you will be spending a lot longer trying to set breakpoints, stepping over/through etc. Even with user requirements helping point you in the right direction it will take time to figure out whats going on (and with out user requirements its even more puzzle solving time). Those that unit test there code, agile or otherwise will likely be saying I have spent less than a minute to no time at all in the debugger today. They will have had the inital hump of learning what the code is doing, but its likely a good set of user requirements and concrete set of tests allows them to zero Read More...
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Roy and Ayende's cross blog debate about VSTS and OSS tools has struck a cord in my mind. If microsoft's customers want to extend the VSTS with OSS tools why should anything stand in their way (they have paid for it to meet there needs after all). What I would like to see is Microsoft openly enage the OSS tool teams in some discussion about how the product can better integrate with OSS tools and and vice-versa. Read More...
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Su Llewellyn has a article up on .NET developers journal on using the MSR Spec Explorer framework for MBT . Read More...
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Jeffery Palermo has a post on "(good) developers test so do testers develop?". My take on this is that most testers can't avoid writing code because a lot of testing requires customization (and even creation) of tools to meet your testing requirements. The amount of tweaking requires often requires you write code, any tester that does'nt go to these lengths either has a very rigid, static system to test or is uneffective at automating their testing. Microsoft and Google are mentioned in the posts and the fact there testing postions need coding ability and an understanding of code to test. I also noticed in the comments of one post that Jason Huggins has been hired at Google (which continues the recent trend at Google for hiring free and OSS test tool engineers) for those of you that don't know him he founded the Selenium functional web testing tool project at ThoughtWorks. Read More...
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Sam has a post on the latest TeamCity 1.2 release , this is a CI offering for Java and (unlike Bamboo) .NET from JetBrains . This release add's a VS plugin so you can see where unit tests have failed in your build direct in your code and a Visual Unsafe support. It also supports NUnit, NAnt and MSBuild. The downside is that it does'nt seem to support NCover/NCoverExplorer or tools like FxCop. I mailed them about MbUnit support (in my quest to get more tools supporting MbUnit) and lending a hand if need be, they mailed me back to say its due in a later version (possibly 2.0). What with Eric's new product coming down the line, its a cool next few months in CI land in the .NET space. CCNet IMHO still remains king in terms of tool support (supporting all of the things in the list of missing tool support in TeamCity), while it is in a development trough right now, thats the nature of OSS and things will pick up again. Read More...
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Phil points to a series of great posts by Jeremy Miller on writing maintainable code. The software ecosystem post is the one I most want to draw your attention to, like Phil suggests, print it out and take it with you where ever you go but live and breath these points. Invest in a CI infrastructure CCNet is free, easy to setup and use and has a vibrant and helpful community to help you out. Marc has a great book on using CCNet that I fully recommend. Automated Unit Tests You should be unit testing your code, there is no excuse. You don't need to be using TDD to unit test (however I recommend learning about it) and if your working with legacy code (which is subject that Jeremy is addressing) then there is a high chance you won't have tests. Invest in learning what you need to know, NUnit and MbUnit are free, there is a ton of information both on the web and in book frorm to give you the skills you need. You can plug them into your CI build to ensure your build quality. Next project Read More...
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Noticed from Sam's post that new Orcas specs are available . Amongst these are specs for improvments to TFS Build so it supports CI out of the box. Reading through the spec, it looks do the business however one thing I am unsure of is notifications out of the box. I guess they will become power toys of one kind or another but CCNet's tray app is something I use the most to tell me about build updates. CCNet's web interface is also great for reporting build profiles, this degree of reporting is missing from the spec. Wonder how this will work in a CodePlex setting? I'd like TFS to support more tools, with so much investment by companies in existing CI and build setup's along with third party and OSS tools it's a tall order to expect them to swap to MS kit and not have the option of re-use. Read More...
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I was pretty buzzed to read about a new plugin for the Eclipse IDE called Mylar, this tool largely allows the IDE workspace to be organized depending on any given task a developer is working on (from a task defect tool such as JIRA or Trac etc). When a developer is assigned a task then the IDE organizes files, resources and other items that are related to that task. This is very cool because it means that the IDE puts its self in a ready state for you to start work on your task. Read More...
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I noticed this announcement on Eric's blog about a new ALM offering coming in early 2007 called Fortress . It's interesting news as it combines Vault and Dragnet for sourcecontrol and project/defect mangement but is very unclear how builds and testing will be approached. It would make sense to me that it uses a OSS tool such as CCNet for this (out of the box with hooks for other CI tools). It also makes sense that for testing Eric and Jamie join heads, the prospect of TD.net on a bit of kit like this has me foaming at the mouth. I'd love to see a OSS license for it too. Read More...
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Peli got me interested in Model Based Testing and every since it's been a personal research topic. Today I came across a MBT project from Microsoft Research called SpecExplorer , it comes complete with a download with all the bits (a C# variant called Spec# and a other tools) to let you explore MBT in your test research. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Read More...
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