John Smart

Automating your build process with Continuous Integration is certainly a great idea, but why stop there? Why not go the whole nine yards and automate the deployment process as well? Staging and production deployments are typically more complicated and more involved than a simple development deployment, but doing them by hand can be time-consuming, tricky and error-prone.

Indeed, turning your staging and production deployments into a one-click affair has a lot going for it.”

A Coding Dojo is a place where programmers come to improve their skills, by following a pattern similar to the martial arts dojo. Participants meet for at a pre-arranged time in a room that has one computer attached to a screen. The aim of the exercise will be to add features to an existing (working) web application, using a variety of technologies, such as Hibernate, JUnit 4, JWebUnit, Selenium, easyb and more. Participants will take turns to code, using pair programming and TDD.

During the session, the group spends a pre-set amount of time developing a solution to the challenge. At the end of the session the code is discarded (often it is archived for future reference and study). The amount of time spent on the problem is fixed. Regardless of the state of the solution, when the time expires, the session is done.

Acceptance Test Driven Development, or ATDD, has proven to be a very effective technique, both for driving and guiding development, and for enhancing communication between developers and other project stakeholders. But why stop there? Well designed Acceptance Tests can also act as a formidable documentation source and communication tool. Indeed, when written in a narrative, BDD-type style, Acceptance Tests have the potential to document in detail how the user interacts with the application.

In this talk we will look at the role of automated Acceptance Tests not only for testing, but also as part of the whole development lifecycle, from writing the user stories right through to deploying the application. We will also look at ways to make your automated acceptance tests more expressive and how to use them more effectively as a communication, reporting and documentation tool.

Finally, we will present and demonstrate a new open source library that helps developers and testers write automated acceptance tests for web applications using WebDriver/Selenium 2. This library also produces clean, narrative-style reports illustrated with screenshots that effectively describe the application's functionality and behaviour, as well as any regressions or pending features.

Continuous Integration is a fundamental best practice of modern software development. In this workshop, you will learn how to set up an effective Continuous Integration environment using Hudson, a popular open source Continuous Integration tool.

You will learn how to reduce integration issues, improve code quality, and improve communication and collaboration between team members. You will also learn how Continuous Integration can act as a communications hub for your development team.

JUnit is the de facto standard in Java testing. Yet many advanced JUnit features are little known and poorly understood. This session reviews some lesser-known features of JUnit, along with a few associated libraries, that can make your unit tests more powerful, expressive, and fun. The session is intended for Java developers, lead developers, and architects trying to introduce good testing practices into their teams.

Attendees will learn about the latest JUnit tips and tricks, including:

• The fine art of naming your tests
• Writing clearer and more expressive tests with Hamcrest and Mockito
• Data-driven testing in JUnit with parameterized tests and theories
• Using JUnit rules to extend your test cases and writing your own rules to customize JUnit
• Extending JUnit by writing your own test runners

Build scripts are an essential art in any software project. And yet they are so often fragile, brittle and unportable things, hard to understand and harder to maintain. In this talk, we cover what constitutes a good build script, and look at a few of the essential rules in writing one.

We will look at general techniques that are applicable to any build scripting technology, as well as some technology-specific tips for Ant and Maven.