Željko Filipin's Blog on Software and Testing

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.