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.

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 was at Software Testers Speak Up Meeting #1 yesterday at Ericsson Nikola Tesla (in Zagreb, Croatia). It was organized by Karlo Šmid.

It was a good meeting. About 15 of us showed up. We introduced ourselves, talked about what we do, asked questions… After and hour or two talking, pizza arrived but the discussions continued, sometimes in smaller groups or pairs. A really good meeting.

The next one will probably be at the same place in a month or two. We will probably have one or two short 10-20 minute talks the next time. I am really looking forward to it.

If you want to continue the discussion from the meeting, ping Karlo (@karlosmid) or me (@zeljkofilipin) at Twitter, join viaqa Google group or viaqa/Croatian Software Testing Network LinkedIn groups.

Update: Karlo wrote about the meeting too.

Yesterday I was at Ruby at Six #2 at Infinum (in Zagreb, Croatia), organized by Nikica Jokić. About 30 people showed up, like the last time.

There were 4 short talks about NoSQL by Damir Bulić, Coffescript by Josip Bišćan, backbone.js by Tomislav Capan, and Mislav Marohnić was supposed to talk about Git but I think he changed the title of his talk to “except on Internet Explorer“. (You had to be there.)

The talks were interesting, but even more interesting were informal conversations after the talks. There was also free homebrew beer. We went home after 10pm, I think that says how interesting the conversations were.

I think this was one of the best meetups I have ever been. The next one will be next month. I hope Ruby at Six will become a tradition.

If you want to continue the conversation, go to ruby-hr Google group or #rubyat6/#rubyatsix at Twitter.

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.

A have written a lot about the conference at it’s web site, and I plan to write more soon, so if you are interested, visit viaqa 11 web site.