TL;DR: Read the book.

Recently I had the pleasure of reading Perfect Software And Other Illusions About Testing by Gerald M. Weinberg. Since we both know I am really bad at book reviews, I will just quote a few things from the book that grabbed my attention while reading it, enough to make a note.

p.24: All in all, testing can be exhausting, but it can never be exaustive.
p.26: Imagine you are about to dine at the Testing Buffet. (Testing Buffet!? See TL;DR.)
p.28: Diversifying your test team might find more problems than enlarging your test team.
p.70: Under such a system of measurement, a lousy developer is tester’s best friend. (Wondering when this is true? See TL;DR.)
p.76: The only real kind of exhaustive testing is when the tester is to exhausted to continue.
p.135: If you don’t care about quality, you can make any schedule.
p.142: The number one testing tool is not the computer, but the human brain.
p.151: There are many ways of testing without involving computers, but no way of testing that doesn’t involve using brains.

And one bug in the book (or maybe not, who knows):

p.101: A white elephant. (I think it should be gold elephant. Elephants!? See TL;DR.)

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.

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.

You can download the free version of the book from GitHub for free.

You can buy the whole book via PayPal for 9$. Since the book is not finished yet, you will get all updates to the book for free. If you already bought the book, I have sent it to you via e-mail.

Major changes since the last release:

- driving opera on Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5

You can see all the changes at GitHub.

Release 0.7 (September 17) had 156 downloads. Not bad.

One person bought the book this month. If two more people buy the book this month, I will buy Mac OS X 10.7 and cover installation for it.

You can buy the whole book via PayPal for 9$. Since the book is not finished yet, you will get all updates to the book for free.

Previous release, 0.6 (July 30) had 498 downloads. Release before, 0.5 (July 23) had 55 downloads, and 0.4.2 (June 20) had 292 downloads. I did not keep record of downloads previous to that. All together, 845 downloads. Not bad.

What is new since the last release?

- managed to drive all browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera) on all operating systems (Windows: XP, Vista, 7; Mac 10.5, 10.6; Ubuntu 11.04) (with a few exceptions, see problems so far a bit below)
- fixed images at the GitHub site
- removed Ubuntu 10.10 and Firewatir chapters, since I consider them obsolete
- using Ruby 1.9.2 on Windows and Ubuntu
- using build-in Ruby on Mac (1.8.6 on 10.5, 1.8.7 on 10.6)

You can see all the changes at GitHub.

Problems so far:
- could not drive Firefox 4+ on Mac 10.5, but Firefox 3.6 works just fine
- could not drive Opera on Windows XP (update: fixed) and Mac 10.5 (update: fixed) (both fixes will be in 0.7.1, should be released this week)
- did not cover Mac 10.7 because I do not have it (if three people buys the book this month, I will buy 10.7)

This is the first version of the book that does not include all chapters that I have written so far, but only those that will get you interested in the book enough to buy it. (I hope.) If you do not want to pay, you can read the whole book at GitHub.

Everybody that already bought the book (all three of them, so far) will get the whole 0.7 version of the book as PDF, EPUB and MOBI files via e-mail.

Watir Book

Did I mention I am writing a book on Watir? It is currently at version 0.6, and it can be downloaded for free as pdf, epub (iPad, iPhone, iPod) and mobi (Kindle) file at github.com/zeljkofilipin/watirbook/downloads. There is also a HTML version at github.com/zeljkofilipin/watirbook.

I have read Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative by Pete McBreen. I liked the book and I want to write this blog post as a reminder for myself that I have read it. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to write a good blog post, so here is just one thought:

Software engineering works on really big projects, software craftsmanship works on smaller projects.

I like the idea of moving from apprentice to journeymen to master.

Let me tell you about a recent chat with my boss. It went something like this:

Boss: “I do not mean to say that I think you are not organized, but are you interested in improvement?”
Me: “Sure. I am always looking for ways to improve.”
Boss: “I have read Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen. Have you heard about it?”
Me: “Yes. Here and there somebody mentions it.”
Boss: “I really like it. I will send you the book, if you would like to read it.”
Me: “Deal.”
Me (thinking): “But I doubt a buzzword will help me.”

Time passed and I have forgot about it. (My boss lives in another country.) One day, the book arrived. I said to myself: “Well, since he has sent it to me, the least I can do is read it. 250 pages is not so much”.

I was skeptical about GTD. Really, really skeptical. But hey, I am a tester. I should be skeptical. Until I see something working, I do not trust it to work.

I always thought of myself as organized person. But, to be honest, for some time I was not happy with the way I organized my work. Like something was missing. I knew I had to change something, but I had so much to do (at work and after it), so I did not have the time to sit down and think where I could improve.

Another thing worth mentioning is that I have bad memory. Really bad memory. What is not written down is forgotten. At the beginning of the book, the author said that everything should be written down. I said to myself: “I already like it.”

I will not get into detail about GTD. You can find a lot about it using your favorite search engine. I just wanted to say that I implemented it in my life and it looks like it is working.

I guess I will have to say more about it in a year or two.

Long long time ago, I was reviewer of Brian Marick’s Everyday Scripting with Ruby. On February 2, 2007 Pragmatic Programmers said they would send me a free copy, but it did not arrive for a long time. I exchanged a few e-mails with them, and today the book arrived. I did not even have time to unwrap it yet.