Željko Filipin's Blog on Software and Testing

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

I have finished reading Jenkins: The Definitive Guide book today. It took me a while to realize there is free pdf version of the book (and $34.99-$49.49 print and ebook versions).

What is Jenkins? From their web site:

In a nutshell Jenkins CI (formerly known as Hudson) is the leading open-source continuous integration server.

The book covers everything you need to know. How to install, use and maintain it. There is also a few chapters about continuous integration in general. I have just scanned chapters on Java specific topics.

I was reading the book and working on setting up Jenkins, just the way I like to learn. First in a virtual machine on my laptop, then on a real server somewhere in Switzerland.

Almost in every chapter I was surprised to learn how powerful Jenkins is. It can do almost anything you need, and all of it can be done from your favorite browser. I plan to write more about how I use Jenkins as soon as I get more experience with it.

At the moment, Jenkins is checking our Git repository every minute. If there are new commits it pulls them and builds the application. If the build is successful it runs a suite of Watir tests. For a while, it was sendin e-mail if build fails to the person that made the last check in. I have disabled it because links in e-mail messages were broken, since Jenkins was installed in a virtual machine on my laptop. I will also investigate distributed builds, if this machine becomes too busy.

The goal is to have automatic builds and one click deploy to production.

At the end, I did not have a lot of trouble installing or using Jenkins, it is pretty straightforward. I had some Git problems, but managed to resolve them. The majority of the work was in adjusting our rake build script to work with Jenkins.

In short, if you need a continuous integration server, I would recommend Jenkins. If you want to read a book about it, I would recommend this book.