Željko Filipin's Blog on Software and Testing

Yesterday I was at Zagreb STC MeetUp #2. It was organized by Karlo Šmid at Ericsson Nikola Tesla.

After the first meetup (which was great) I thought the second one could be only worse. But to my great surprise, it was even better than the first one!

About ten of us appeared. Pizza was already there, so we started talking informally while eating pizza. (We even had a snack and refreshment sponsor, Calyx.)

Karlo brought a few books, I brought a few and we organized a little library. I think I got a pretty good deal, I borrowed a few good books:

• Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing by Gerald M. Weinberg
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Cem Kaner, James Bach and Bret Pettichord
• Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk and Hung Q. Nguyen

(Book reviews coming soon.)

While we were still eating pizza, Karlo had a talk about The Grinder, a Java Load Testing Framework. After that I talked about Watir (automated testing that doesn’t hurt), Cucumber (making BDD fun) and Sikuli (automate anything you see) and how I use them together.

A really important part of every meetup are informal conversations in pairs or small groups, and we also had plenty of those.

A really good meetup. If you have a chance to attend the next one, I would highly recommend it.

Agile Testing: The Book

TL;DR: It is a good book.

I won the Agile Testing book in lottery while I was at The Austin Workshop on Test Automation (AWTA) in Austin, Texas, in January 2009. I have met both authors, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, at AWTA and even recorded a podcast about the book. I was planning to read it since then. But, as it usually goes, I had other things to do. I finally decided I will read the book a few months ago, and I was reading it a few pages a day. While reading it, I had to quickly read another book, so everything is a bit blurry. A few days ago, I have finally read the book.

Probably the most useful part of the book for me was part 3, the agile testing quadrants. It was introduced by Brian Marick way back in 2003, but I do not think I have heard a lot about it until I found it in the book.

I am pretty bad at book reviews, so I will not go into details. There are a lot of reviews at Amazon, if you like to read them.

Feedback like this makes me want to spend even more of my time writing the Watir Book and giving it away for free*.

Thanks for wasting a bunch of my time. Next time, before you publish something you might want to check that it works. I’ve spent 5 hours trying to get this shit to run and I can’t get the dev kit (ruby dk.rb install) to install. A search indicates that I’m not the only one having this issue. WHat a BUSH operation: from Ruby to Watir to YOU.

Please: take your page down — stop wasting peoples’ time.

On your BEST DAY, you’re an IDIOT.

* I am selling the book, but all content is available on GitHub for free. I have spent hundreds of hours on the book so far, and I have earned about $200. Do the math.

Update: I have replied after I updated the instructions.

Hi,

Thanks for the kind words. Since you have asked so nicely, I have just spent another afternoon and evening away from my family, updating instructions on how to install Watir:

https://github.com/zeljkofilipin/watirbook/blob/master/installation/windows.md

I did it just for you, for free of course, as always. Please notice new chapter, DevKit.

Regards,

Željko