9. August 2010
On the way to work this morning I was thinking about this concept. It seems to be a fundamental truth, even though it seems paradoxical when you first look at it.
It often happens when I find an error in a new or changed feature that my “spider sense” starts tingling. The test scenario, test data and intuition/experience make me start thinking that this error is just the tip of the iceberg … The literature on software testing confirms that errors rarely come alone, but how far should we go along the path of searching for more errors – using less and less typical data / scenarios on the way?
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Posted by Michael Beier in Testing | Comments Off
28. July 2010
The Eclipse Testing Day Team (with kind help from Imbus AG) spent last week looking over and evaluating the submissions for the Eclipse Testing Day, and we’re pleased to announce that we now have an exciting and varied program for the day on the 8th September.
The full program is available on the Eclipse Testing Day Wiki Page, and we’re pleased to be able to offer a selection of talks about different areas of testing, including:
- Acceptance and GUI testing
- Embedded testing in OSGi
- Scope and coverage of tests
- Unit testing
- Test generation
As mentioned in the previous post, registration is now open on the Eventbrite Site. Member tickets (Eclipse and OSGi members) are priced at 40€ net, non-members at 50€ net. The ticket cost covers the event organization and includes catering during the day and the evening reception.
We’re looking forward to a successful day – start inviting colleagues, contact us if you’d like the logo and we’ll see you on the 8th September in Darmstadt!
Posted by Alex Imrie in Eclipse, Events | 1 Comment »
30. June 2010
The registration for the Eclipse Testing Day on the 8th September in Darmstadt is now open!
We’ve created an Eventbrite site to ease the registration process. Details of prices and payment are both on the Eclipse wiki and directly on the Eventbrite site, but just get in touch if you have questions.
We’ve also extended the call for papers for another week – you have until the 10th July to submit your abstract (again, details on the Eclipse wiki). Any Eclipse and/or testing enthusiasts are invited to tell us about how they test, and of course, to register for the day. Tickets are limited to 80 participants, so we recommend registering early!
Posted by Alex Imrie in Eclipse, Events | Comments Off
23. June 2010
I think we can say that the Eclipse Demo Camp in Hannover was a resounding success. The cooperation between Brox, Bredex and Hannover IT (with the kind support of the Eclipse Foundation of course) worked really well – we had over 70 participants who saw four demos about various topics in the world of Eclipse.
The first half of the evening saw Brox’s demonstration of SMILA followed by a demonstration of testing Eclipse applications with GUIdancer by Bredex. After a short break the camp continued with the two final demos: Erhard Weinell of Yatta Solutions showing their UML Lab and Sven Efftinge demonstrating XText. If there is a prize for how many Eclipse Award winners are present at a Demo Camp, then this one is a good contender: Both XText and GUIdancer were winners of awards this year.
After the demos there was enough time for chatting, discussions and introductions – Ralph Müller from Eclipse and Michaela Kraft from Microsoft were both on hand to provide excellent networking opportunities.
With even more new faces at this demo camp than the previous one in November, our hope of creating a strong Eclipse community in the Hannover/Braunschweig region seems to be becoming reality. Stay tuned for more Eclipse events!
The slides from the demo camp are available on the Eclipse Wiki.
Posted by Alex Imrie in Eclipse, Events | Comments Off
27. May 2010
One of the things we’ve been working on in terms of agility over the past few sprints is improving our stories for the sprint.
Previously we’d found ourselves wasting time because a story wasn’t thought through well enough, either from the development/implementation perspective (we went the wrong way technology-wise) or in terms of the features (incomplete or inconsistent concepts, for example). We were also ending up at the end of a sprint with nothing deliverable because our chunks were often too big.
After a good session with Lisa Crispin last October, we put some ideas into motion about making our stories better described, with a focus on deliverable, testable requirements.
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Posted by Alex Imrie in General | 1 Comment »
10. May 2010
Over the next few months, BREDEX is working with two companies (and the Eclipse Foundation!) to organize two Eclipse events:
Eclipse Demo Camp
On the 21st June, we’ll be organizing an Eclipse Demo Camp in Hannover with Brox IT Solutions GmbH. We already have three confirmed demos and are waiting on another two, so we’re looking forward to another successful camp. The Eventbrite page is up and running for you to register, and details about the Demo Camp are on the Eclipse Wiki.
Eclipse Testing Day
On September 8th, we’ll be in Darmstadt with MicroDoc GmbH for the Eclipse Testing Day. The call for papers is now open, and we look forward to hearing your suggestions for talks about testing Eclipse as a platform, testing OSGi applications and testing tools based on Eclipse. We’re also still looking for sponsors – more details are on the wiki page.
These two events should be a great chance to meet people from the Braunschweig and Hannover region, as well as test enthusiasts within the Eclipse Community – so get registering, submit a talk and come and meet us at one (or both) of the events!
Posted by Alex Imrie in Eclipse, Events | Comments Off
26. April 2010
The Apache POI project provides a free open-source library for creating, reading and manipulating Microsoft Office documents. The functionality for working with Excel files is pretty mature and is quite feature-complete.
Lately, I was confronted with a problem concerning formula evaluation. I had a pre-existing Excel template file that had some cells with placeholder texts. These texts are replaced with number values available at runtime. The result is saved as a new file. This works great with POI until a cell with a placeholder text is used within a formula of another cell. When looking at the template, Excel then obviously complains about the data type of the values used within the formula.
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Posted by Henning Faber in Java | Comments Off
21. April 2010
One of the side-effects we’ve noticed from agile processes is that we don’t really have the option of releasing a beta-version anymore. Previously, we did “mini-releases” at certain points of development, when specific features were finished, so that they could be given to quality assurance or customers as a preview.
Now we have a continuous integration process; the latest version of the software is built and tested every night. This has brought us many benefits: we have quicker feedback on developments and the team can work with the current version each day. However, despite having functional software every morning, we don’t have a version any more that we can call a beta. Daily builds are feature-incomplete and there are occasionally areas that shouldn’t be touched or worked with because they are still somewhat under construction. If we’ve been working on epics, then we often have new developments that are leading up to a new big feature, but not the actual feature itself. It’s hard to make a cut and say “this is the beta”.
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Posted by Alex Imrie in Agile | Comments Off
12. April 2010
Many of the reasons I’ve read for working agilely talk about customer satisfaction, being able to react to changes and better quality. These are all excellent reasons, and we have discovered the benefits of them for ourselves in various projects. I’d just like to add a reason to the list, which is more from the perspective of people working in the team. Being a part of an agile team is exciting. In my experience, the culture in agile projects has a tendency to be much more open. Suggestions about anything from feature implementations, to usability to improvements to the process itself are generally easier to incorporate. Especially in terms of the process, it is easy to try out an idea for one sprint to see how it works. Having a short lessons learned workshop at the end of a sprint helps the process to become gradually better each time: what aspects can be removed from the process, what could we be doing more of to help us?
Maybe it’s an obvious point, but I’d like to suggest that agility isn’t just beneficial for the customer; it’s also beneficial for the team.
Posted by Alex Imrie in Agile | Comments Off
25. March 2010
Shipping commercial software is generally more complicated than just compiling some class files and delivering them. Making software available to the public means that you want customers to use the cool new features, but you don’t want them to know how these features were implemented. Code obfuscation is unavoidable if you want to make it harder to decompile and understand your code. Also, if you want to brand your JARs and don’t want your delivered software to be easily modifiable, then you can make use of JAR-signing which is a built-in JDK feature.
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Posted by Markus Tiede in General, Java | Comments Off
