Sunday, December 12, 2010

Trying out BDD With SpecFlow and Selenium - Part 1

One of the biggest things I learned when I was working as a tester at IBM is how important testing really is in applications large and small. While I've moved on to full time development the test side of my work has really never gone away. While working on updating one of the features of the Extend Health side we've decided that it would be a good time to try out some testing that hasn't been covered much.

So with that we've decided to try out some Behavior Driven Development and write some integration tests for this new feature. Since we're a .NET shop we've decided to give SpecFlow a try instead of running Cucumber straight on Ruby. Fortunately if we ever decide to switch from SpecFlow to Cucumber our features will transition directly since they are in the Gherkin format. The main reason we're trying out this Gherkin format is that it gives us a Business Readable Domain Specific Language.

The advantage that this would buy us is that we could document the sites features in a way that both the business development team could read and write features in a way that we in development could directly write tests against them. This also helps us in development because we have a solid list of features we know that we need to implement and that we should be less likely to either break that feature or miss it altogether. This is one thing that Unit Tests just don't really buy you. It would be easy enough to write a suite of Unit Tests that don't cover the actual feature itself as described by the business.

So lets get to what a test in SpecFlow looks like.

Feature: Share this post
    In order to increase traffic to the blog to increase advertising revenue
    I want readers to share posts they find interesting

Scenario: Share on Twitter
    Given a person reading a blog post
    When they press the "Tweet This" button
    Then the Twitter popup should appear

So there we go, that's pretty simple looking right? That right there is the beauty of the Gherkin syntax to me. It is structured enough that we crazy programmer types could turn that into some tests (and we'll get there) but the business types can also read and understand what is going on here. Oh and because I think this is awesome, using Cucumber you can write this in a ton of different spoken languages.

One thing I'd like to point out though, is that while features and scenarios look really simple, I've found so far that the hardest part is writing a clear feature and scenario. Writing unit tests aren't very difficult since you break that down as much as possible. It all comes down to communication really, finding the best way to describe a feature without getting too broad or too detailed. The cucumber docs do have a really great example (scroll to the bottom) of applying the Five Whys to really decide why you want a feature and how to describe it.

So now that we've had a chance to check out the Gherkin syntax that SpecFlow uses, in my next post I'll show the actual code behind this feature and how we're starting to use Selenium to verify these features.

Sunday, December 05, 2010

One Week Down Learning JavaScript and jQuery

Like I mentioned in my last post I've started a new job this Monday at Extend Health working in .NET with a bunch of fun technologies including ASP.NET MVC2, Nhibernate, some FubuMVC and  using a bunch of jQuery. At my last job at Mediaport I had just started teaching myself both ASP.NET MVC2 and digging deeper into JavaScript and jQuery. Now that my first week is done at Extend Health I've been happily digging through all the code and working on my assignment to study some more on JavaScript.

This week I have been reading Douglas Crockford's book JavaScript: The Good Parts. I had watched a video of his talk about JavaScript's good parts at Yahoo! before but reading this book has really opened my eyes to JavaScript and the power as well as pitfalls of the language. It is definitely going to take some time to fully appreciate the power JavaScript has.

So onto a little bit of what I've been up to during my first week.

jQuery Templates:

Besides just trying to become more familiar with JavaScript as well as jQuery I was looking at places we might be able to try out jQuery Templates which is one of the plugins developed by Microsoft that have recently become official parts of jQuery. After playing a little bit with the jQuery Templates I have to say that I really like them. I've seen a few template plugins that rely on you dumping all the templates into big ugly strings and with jquery-tmpl you can avoid all that. Here is a quick sample of one:



Pretty straightforward but the nice thing is that you don't have any ugly string to muck with. Instead you get a nicely encapsulated template which has a competent set of features including the each, if/else, and nesting of templates. I'll have to use it some more but this plugin looks really great and should get even better over time.

jQuery Datalink and Knockout.js


Along with the jQuery Templates I checked out another plugin from Microsoft called jQuery Datalink. The datalink plugin lets you bind a JavaScript object to a form and keep the two in sync without having to write a bunch of extra code. Here is a quick example of binding a form to a JavaScript object.


    var person = {};
    $("form").bind(person);

With that, we've bound the person object to the form. This will give person the attributes firstName and lastName. Now whenever the text changes for the firstName or lastName text inputs the person object will be updated. Pretty simple, but it could prove useful.

While looking at the jQuery Datalink plugin I heard about Knockout.js which also provides databinding but takes a different approach than jQuery Datalink. In Knockout things are much more JavaScript oriented and is based of of the Model View ViewModel (MVVM) pattern.
So in Knockout, we create a view model that we will bind its attributes to in the HTML.

    The first name is 
    The last name is 

    var myViewModel = {
        personFirstName: ko.observable('Bob'),
        personLastName: ko.observable('Marley'),
    }

    ko.applyBindings(myViewModel);

And with that whenever the underlying JavaScript object changes the values will be updated in the HTML. That is just a simple example of what Knockout can do. Knockout looks like a really interesting project and the style of binding should feel familiar to any Silverlight or WPF developers since that is what this is based off. Hopefully I'll have some more time to write about Knockout.js as it seems like a really interesting project.

My first week has been really fun and I'm really looking forward to mastering JavaScript and digging much deeper in to ASP.NET MVC and C#. So here's to learning more code!

Monday, November 08, 2010

A Change of Pace

It has been a while since I last posted anything up on my blog (apparently when IBM laid me off) so I'm starting to sense a bit of a trend here. :)

Since my last post I got a job with a couple of great friends at Mediaport Entertainment doing .NET development starting with Silverlight and ASP.NET. It has been a really great experience to get back into .NET from Java and I've had lots of fun picking up the many ways C# has changed from its early Java-clone days. We've been working on the next version of our web store and I helped decide that we should move away from Silverlight and ASP.NET to give ASP.NET MVC a try. It has been a great experience learning web development with this platform and I'm excited to keep building my skills in web development and learning Javascript / jQuery.

But now I'm moving to a new company that I'm really excited about. Extend Health is where I've decided to move to now and I am really looking forward to starting there. They have a great team of developers, many of them Neumont graduates. I'll still be doing .NET and ASP.NET MVC development but I feel I'm going to have a great time learning from all the developers there.

And to finish off Extend Health was the first company I've had an interview where I was asked to build a web app and on the next interview we would discuss it. I have to say I love that idea for an interview so much better than whiteboarding a simple linked list implementation!

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Time for a Change

This Monday has proven to be an interesting one. I arrived at work in the morning and managed to start getting into a productive groove, which can be difficult on a Monday, only to have everything flopped upside down by lunch. I had a meeting with my manager and found out that I've been part of a Resource Action (IBM-speak for layoff) so as of March 1st I am back on the market for a new job. Even though I was aware something like this might come up I have to admit I'm still trying to get my head around what has happened. My first job and also my first layoff... Live and learn I suppose.

I've had a lot of fun at IBM and I've really had a great learning experience of life inside a company as big as IBM. Going straight from school to IBM was daunting to me but I feel really great that I have accomplished something for myself. I've met some really great people that I hope to keep in contact with once I find a new job. So as my time with IBM has come to an end I am looking forward anxiously to the next thing for me to work on. Thanks for all the good times IBM!

Now that all that is out of the way, if you happen to be hiring or know anyone who may be hiring I'd love to hear from you! :-) You can find me on LinkedIn or check my Stack Overflow CV.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Learning Scala pt 1: First Impressions

My first foray into learning Scala with the help of O'Reilly's Learning Scala, and the interwebs. I'll be posting things as I learn them in a way to help cement my understanding of the language and so if I'm wrong, people can call me on it.

As a Java programmer, I've been very interested in watching all the languages that are beginning to spring up around the JVM. From JRuby, Jython, Groovy, Clojure, and Scala they've all been interesting to watch take the JVM to new heights beyond Java. So far, I've been mostly interested in languages started on the JVM (though JRuby and Jython look nice) since they are designed from the ground up to take advantage of the vast number of Java libraries in a natural way.

My first dabble was with Groovy which takes many of its ideas from Ruby, but can still be written in a very Java-centric way. Specifically, Groovy was written to be more of a superset of Java including duck typing and Closures into the mix and letting you write applications much more quickly and concisely than one could in Java. Unfortunately I haven't really played with Groovy much recently but it seems like it would be a great JVM-based glue language or for writing up a quick prototype.

Scala has been drawing me in over the past couple weeks and feels like it could be a full replacement language for Java where with Groovy it felt like an additional tool in my Java workbench. After reading Chapter 1 of Learning Scala here are my impressions of Scala thus far:

Functional and Object Oriented

From the start Scala mixes both functional aspects (much of which still confuse my Object Oriented mind so far), and Object Oriented programming. We have Classes and inheritance but also have pattern matching and Actors.

Less Verbose than Java

Scala, like many other languages, is less verbose than Java in several ways. First, there is no need for the semicolon (in most cases), or even for return statements of methods. Scala will usually handle these things for you, so a method foo, that adds two numbers, could be written like this:
def foo = { 1 + 1 }
Which returns an Integer.

A nice feature of Scala is that you can choose to specifically type your variables or let Scala figure that out. In Scala, the type comes after the variable name to make it easy to parse when the variable is not typed.

Strange at First

As a Java programmer I've gotten pretty used to how things are with Java so beginning to learn Scala has left a few parts of my mind that stick out.

Method Names

Scala is much more flexible in what a method name can be, this includes these characters to name a few: "+,-,<,>,*,/,?,!". This seemed very unnatural to me coming from Java where this is not possible. This also is confusing because it looks like operator overloading but actually isn't operator overloading, these are method names, so one could define a "+" method or a ">" method and be perfectly fine with Scala.

This will definitely take some getting used to but I think it could be very handy especially when the need for a DSL arises.

No static keyword

With Java, declaring a class-level variable is as easy as tacking the static keyword to it. With Scala, there is no static keyword, instead, for class level variables you use the object keyword instead of class.
class foo() {         
    // Instance variables go here 
}

object foo() {         
    // Class level variables go here
}

Overall Scala isn't too different from Java on first glance. While there certainly will be more differences, it is easy enough for me to start jumping in and playing around with Scala.

test

trying out some code formatting