Author: Noel Rappin

A Pair of Kings Beats A Single Ace: Pair Programming, Agile Rails, and You

Noel Rappin, Friday, September 25, 2009 @ 8:59 am

A lot of pair programming chatter this week. Starting with a New York times article describing pair programming at Hashrocket. It's an interesting article, with a tone that could be described as "anthropologist describing the strange, yet quaint customs of the native tribe"

Obie Fernandez followed up with a list of 10 reasons why pairing doesn't work in most cases. It's actually a list of the things that Hashrocket does to support pairing, although entries like "2. Most software developers just don't want to work that hard" and "1. Most software shops don't really care about excellence" do have a certain, "aren't we great" vibe to them, causing Mike Gunderloy to dryly observe: "Funny, Extreme Programming Explained never said anything about fancy hw or being awesome as a prerequisite for pair programming."

C'mon Mike -- everybody knows that being awesome is a prerequisite for everything in XP.

Josh Susser adds that pair programming isn't right for all projects, particularly projects that have long compile times that force the pair to stare blankly at the screen.

I'd also add this interview with Kent Beck because a) every programmer could use some more Kent Beck in their life and b) because he talks about XP as being concerned with the the social context of programmers, with pairing being a part of that.

Now you are caught up. Here's the part where I talk.

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Corners of the Rubyverse: RVM and MacRuby

Noel Rappin, Friday, September 18, 2009 @ 10:59 am

Please continue reading after the next sentence.

I installed Snow Leopard a couple of weeks ago.

Wait -- don't stop reading. This isn't a post about how to install MySQL or a post about whether or not Snow Leopard is the Greatest Thing Ever. There are plenty of other places on the Internet where you can get that information.

I wanted to talk about two cool corners of the Ruby universe that I started using as a result of my Snow Leopard installation: MacRuby and RVM Continue reading »

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WindyCityRails: My Presentation Checklist

Noel Rappin, Friday, September 11, 2009 @ 10:14 am

WindyCityRails 2008

Sometimes I write these just for me.

As I've mentioned a couple of times, tomorrow I'll be speaking at WindyCityRails, and I need a checklist of all things I don't want to forget, and all thing things I want to do to make the talk great.
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Ask A Rails Tester Person

Noel Rappin, Friday, September 4, 2009 @ 9:39 am

Ask Mr. Lizard, from Jim Henson's Dinosaurs

It's time to play "Ask A Tester Person", where I answer questions that I've gotten via email or otherwise about Rails Testing topics.

If you have a question for Ask A Tester Person, send it to railsprescriptions at gmail.com.

I've got two questions today:
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Bridging the Gap Between Rails Developers and HTML Designers

Noel Rappin, Friday, August 28, 2009 @ 9:56 am

To make a cheap joke and paraphrase a common quote, web developers and web designers are two groups separated by common languages. In our case, the languages are HTML and CSS, which are the output of both the web design process and the web development process. Developers and designers produce their HTML/CSS in different ways and with different goals. Here are some ideas for bridging the gap so that the developers and designers on your team can work together smoothly.

Designers and developers obviously have different goals for their HTML -- developers have issues of reducing duplication, organization, and performance that are largely not the designer's concerns. The designer is primarily concerned with how the HTML looks and behaves to the user.

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Rails Testing First Look: Blue Ridge

Noel Rappin, Friday, August 21, 2009 @ 10:26 am

Blue Ridge Mountains by eleda 1

So, I tried Blue Ridge for the first time yesterday and I thought I'd write down some quick impressions. Hence, Rails Testing First Look.

Disclaimer: We came into this tool so cold our toes froze. We fumbled, we made mistakes, we probably missed really great ways of doing things. I look forward to being enlightened.

Let's do this question-and-answer style: Continue reading »

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Functional Testing Annoyances, Wapcaplet, And You

Noel Rappin, Friday, August 7, 2009 @ 3:45 pm

Here's a minor thing that bugs me all the time.

I'm writing a functional test:

should "do something functional"
  get :search,  rder_id => @order.id, :user_id => @user.id
  # and so on
end

The get call in that test simulates a browser request. Intuitively, you would (well, I would) expect this request to be identical to a request coming from the actual view, via a helper like link_to("search", :action => :search, rder_id => @order.id, :user_id => @user.id). At least, you'd expect that parameters hash in the controller to be the same between the

Makes sense, right? The testing call should set up the same environment as the actual call being tested. Continue reading »

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Help, My Test Is Failing!

Noel Rappin, Friday, July 31, 2009 @ 11:11 am

Frustration, the game, photo by unlovalblesteve

Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot -- tests are passing, looks like it's time for lunch -- dot, dot, dot, dot, F. F? F? But the code works. I know it does. I think it does. Why is my test failing?

One of the most frustrating times as a TDD developer is that moment when a test is failing and you don't know why, as opposed to the more normal case where the test fails as expected. Here's a grab bag of tips, tricks, hints, and thoughts to get us all through that difficult time.

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Real Testing Example, Part Two

Noel Rappin, Friday, July 24, 2009 @ 10:45 am

Spam Wall, by freezelight

What with upward of two people saying nice things about last week’s post, I’ve decided to keep going with part two of a look at some real testing code.

Most code-heavy tutorials show the code but not the tests — I’m doing the opposite here, and showing the tests, but not much of the code. Also, although I’m presenting these tests in chunks, you should realize that there was a lot of back-and-forth from Cucumber to tests to code and some backtracking, most of which I’ll spare you from having to wade through.

At the end of last week, I had run through the tests for spam-prevention code which worked by limiting the rate at which a user could send messages to other users of a particular social networking site. Cucumber was involved, and I think I went off on a tangent about writing lots of tests.

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A Real Testing Example

Noel Rappin, Friday, July 17, 2009 @ 3:36 pm

Spam Wall, by freezelight

As sort-of promised in last week’s post, I’m going to work through a real-world test example, with an eye toward explaining how and why I tested the way I did. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do this at blog-post length. If not, well, there’s always next week.

This site, which was a legacy rescue, allows users to send messages to each other within the site without having to give away their other contact information. The problem is that nefarious spammer types were creating logins and immediately sending messages to large numbers of the user population, irritating them. After some deliberation, the client decided on a rate-limiting strategy, where a member could only send a certain number of messages in a day, and a new member could send even fewer messages a day. Messages above that point would require administrative action to unblock the user’s privileges.

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To Mock Or Not To Mock

Noel Rappin, Friday, July 10, 2009 @ 4:55 pm

Today, bereft of post ideas, I asked my vast Twitter army (which, if you subtract the bots, probably numbers in the dozens...) for topics, and the leading (not to mention only) vote-getter was "a good rant on mocking vs not-mocking"... Well, I can't promise a good rant, but here goes nothin'

Here's my starting point: Mock objects are best used in the following 2 1/2 situations:
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Elements of Testing Style

Noel Rappin, Friday, July 3, 2009 @ 7:28 am

Cover image from Amazon.com

It's been way too long since I blathered on about style issues. Today I'd like to talk about testing style. This article assumes you are already writing tests and already using something approaching a Test-Driven Development process -- I'm not here to argue about process, at least not today.

Today the topic is the actual construction of individual tests, how to name them, how to group them, where to get data from and the like.

I suspect I'll think of five more things right after I post this, so look for an update sometime in the future. The update will also address all the places where everybody tells me that I'm totally wrong.

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What’s In Your Dock: iPhone edition

Noel Rappin, Friday, June 26, 2009 @ 2:29 pm

It's been a while since I've been desparate enough to had a chance to do a nice "what's in your toolbox" kind of post. In honor of the iPhone 3.0 upgrade, and Steve Jobs' liver, let's do an iPhone-toolbox post.

I'm unabashedly happy with my phone, because it's strengths and weaknesses mesh pretty well with my actual needs. It's not that great a phone, but I don't use the phone that much. On the other hand, there's never been a better gizmo for whiling away a long train commute.

So, here's some stuff I use:

Instapaper (free light version, $9.99 pro version currently on sale for $4.99)

Instapaper has probably changed my web reading habits more than any other app since I started using RSS readers. It's so simple that its almost hard to believe how useful it is. When I come across an article on the web I want to save for later, I click a bookmarklet. Later, launching Instapaper on the phone, the article shows up, with the images stripped away, and the text presented in a reader friendly format. (Sometimes you can help Instapaper out by invoking it from the printer-friendly version of a page...)

Using Instapaper has become kind of second nature -- I always have a few articles ready to go. The Pro version adds a few nice features, including control of the display font and the ability to scroll the article by tilting the phone. The tilt-scroll sounds like you'll need to be a gymnast or something to read an article, but in practice it's a super-clean interface for reading long articles and letting the text scroll at your reading speed. Great app.

Birdhouse ($3.99)

Very well designed little app for what seems like a dumb use case -- saving drafts of posts intended for Twitter. I mean, how much do you need to polish that tweet about the ham sandwich you had for lunch, amirite?

But, if you are trying to do a tip a day on Twitter (@railsrx), then having a nice place to store up ideas for future tips is great. The app also works as a slightly structured note-taking app, since it can email it's existing draft population back to you.

Stanza / Kindle (Free)

The two leading general-purpose eBook readers, both of them are easy to use, and manage the task of making text readable on an iPhone. It'd be nice if there was some consistency in formats between the two apps, and also if you could buy books directly from the Kindle App (presumably that's coming).

MLB At Bat ($9.99)

Obviously only if you are a baseball fan, but the app gives you access to live box score and play-by-play data, live audio stream of radio broadcast, video highlights, special goodies like condensed game videos a few hours after games and, plus live video streaming on a currently limited basis. That's a lot of stuff. Add in the fact that the app is pretty enough to have won an Apple Design Award, and it's a pretty fabulous package.

Twitteriffic (Free lite, $3.99 no-ads)

There are something like a zillion Twitter clients on the iPhone at last count, and which one to pick is basically idiosyncratic. It's a mark of how fast iPhone development is going that Twitteriffic 1.0 won an Apple Design Award in 2008 and was completely blown away by newer clients six months later before regaining strong status with the 2.0 release. I find this has a nice blend of features and interface. (Tweetie, which is my desktop client, is also very good on the iPhone).

Of course, this all sounds serious -- the big winners on the iPhone have all been games, there are all kinds of inexpensive, addictive little games I play. Here are a few: Defender Chronicles, The Creeps, Drop 7, Flight Control, Frenzic, Galcon, Peggle, Strategery.

Related Services: iPhone Application Development

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Upcoming Pathfinder Appearances

Noel Rappin, Friday, June 19, 2009 @ 8:14 am

Windy City Rails is September 12, 2009

Here are a couple of upcoming Ruby and Rails-based appearances by Pathfinder personnel:

On Tuesday, June 23, Noel Rappin (referring to himself in the third person) will be the guest speaker at the Chicago Ruby.org monthly meeting. The meeting starts at 6:00 at Chicago Ruby's downtown loop meeting location, see the link for details. The working title of my talk is "I'd Like To Start Testing. Now What?" and it'll be an informal discussion of testing tools and good practice.

The schedule for WindyCityRails was announced this week. The conference is September 12, 2009 at the Westin Chicago River North. John McCaffrey from Pathfinder will be presenting "Super-easy PDF Generation with Prawn and Prawnto", and I'll be up there with "How To Test Absolutely Anything".

Other speakers include Ryan Singer from 37signals, Ben Scofield from Viget Labs, and Yehuda Katz from Engine Yard.

Registration through August 1st is $99, there are a couple of tutorial sessions also available for purchase.

This was a very well-run regional conference last year, and I'm excited for this year's edition. Hope to see you there.

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The Return of the Cucumber

Noel Rappin, Friday, June 12, 2009 @ 1:37 pm

Same Photo by Nick Atkins Photography

I mentioned last week that the RubyMine post was replacing what I had meant to write about. Well, this week we finally get to it...

It's been about ten weeks since I wrote about Cucumber the first time and the second time. Since then, I've continued to use Cucumber and now seemed like a good time to update some thoughts on how and why it seems to be working for us.

The big headline, of course, is that I'm still using it after ten weeks. I'm pretty quick to abandon tools that aren't pulling their weight, so just the fact that Cucumber is still in the toolbox means that despite the time that it takes to write Cucumber tests and step definitions, I'm finding the process of writing the tests and the tests themselves to be valuable.

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