#Testing

Continuous integration is key to good development practices if you’re a team any larger than, well… one. But spinning up a CI server is still an exercise fraught with peril.

Add in getting one up for Rails that can deal with Cucumber and capybara testing (needing a browser for js testing) and rspec and if you don’t have someone with solid sysadmin skills, most teams throw up their hands. Also, if you’re doing this for short duration projects (yeah, I’m looking at you RailsRumble and Hack weekends), you really want something that you can spin up or down at will and not have serious iron dedicated to doing this. We chose to put ours on Amazon’s EC2. We chose Hudson, a rather excellent java CI server despite my personal feelings about java (and also the excellent hudson ruby gem that makes running it locally no effort at all).

I’ve become a big fan of Cucumber in a very short amount of time. Mostly, because it’s enabled us to translate user requirements quickly into step by step instructions we can then code to. Especially with the turnover in staff at AI this means that business logic, reasoning and behaviour lives in the app and can be reviewed without a lot of overly hefty documentation and such. Write code to reflect behaviour, test, deploy. Voila, app done !

I like this. From mattf’s shinily resurfaced blog .

1. Go to google docs, click new spread sheet
2. Click form, create your form with title, description, severity (1 minor .. 5 epic fail), who’s responsible in a dropdown and reported by.
3. Save your form
4. Add conditional colouring in spreadsheet on severity
5. Add a completed/status column
6. Embed form onto a page/email form to bug hunters

Love the simplicity of this.

The only thing I’d add is that you should go into the resulting spreadsheet, go to Share | Set Notification rules and have it email you whenever anyone submits a form right away.