Category Archives: Agile Software Development

Code Coverage — a simple Rails example

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: September 18, 2014

My tests are my safety net. With them I can refactor with confidence, knowing that I’m keeping the functionality I intended. With them, I can grow my codebase, knowing that I’m not introducing regression errors. How do I have confidence that my safety net is good enough? One metric I can use to help with this […]

Also posted in Continuous Integration, Engineering, Quality Software, Rails, Ruby, Software Craftsmanship, Test Driven Development | Leave a comment

Getting Growl notifications from your Virtual Machine

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: September 7, 2014

As I develop I have Guard running in the background, executing my tests when things change. But I often don’t have the Terminal window front and centre, so I like to have Growl notifications for my test results. Setting up Growl to push notifications from the Virtual Machine to the host is a little tricky, so here’s a […]

Also posted in Engineering, Quality Software, Rails, Ruby, Software Craftsmanship, Test Driven Development | 1 Response

Using Spring with RSpec and Guard to speed up testing

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: September 4, 2014

In my last post I showed you how to setup Guard and RSpec so you can automatically run tests when things change. Now lets get things cooking on gas by using the Spring application preloader. This will mean that your app framework will only have to load once, and tests will be super zippy. Setting up […]

Also posted in Engineering, Rails, Ruby, Software Craftsmanship, Test Driven Development | Leave a comment

Getting Started with Guard and RSpec

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: September 4, 2014
"Detroit Publishing Co. - A Yeoman of the Guard (N.B. actually a Yeoman Warder), full restoration" by Adam Cuerden, Detroit Publishing Company - http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002696943/. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detroit_Publishing_Co._-_A_Yeoman_of_the_Guard_(N.B._actually_a_Yeoman_Warder),_full_restoration.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Detroit_Publishing_Co._-_A_Yeoman_of_the_Guard_(N.B._actually_a_Yeoman_Warder),_full_restoration.jpg

As I build out an application I want to ensure it’s behaving as I intend it. RSpec is a great framework for testing Ruby code, and is the tool I use most for my testing. But tests are pretty useless if you don’t run them, and rather than manually run tests when I change things, […]

Also posted in Engineering, Quality Software, Rails, Ruby, Software Craftsmanship, Test Driven Development | 3 Responses

Building A Pristine Rails Virtual Machine

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: August 28, 2014

A (thankfully) long time ago in a galaxy far far away I developed web apps in Flash. And when I had to target different versions I had to go through a whole rigamarole of uninstalling and reinstalling plugins. Fast forward to now and I’m often working on projects in Ruby. I’ve found RVM and gemsets […]

Also posted in Engineering, Rails, Ruby, Software Craftsmanship | Leave a comment

Using Puppet and Vagrant to make a one-click development environment

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: August 26, 2014
Rees's Polygraph

Keeping a development environment clean and tidy can be a bitch. When you are working on multiple projects across different platforms it can get messy really fast. And if you’re managing a team of people and need them all to run your app locally things can get tricky too. Recently I’ve setup a process so […]

Also posted in Engineering, Rails, Ruby, Software Craftsmanship | Leave a comment

Try this, my mini-application for software estimation

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: July 5, 2011

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a simple yet powerful process for software estimation. When I was done I started to look at my excel worksheet for doing this process and figured that it could be something I could share with a broader audience. Rather than just post an excel file, I decided […]

Also posted in Quality Software, Software Estimation | Leave a comment

Code Coverage with Flex – a headless agent for CI builds

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: July 28, 2009

In my last blog post I gave details of how I user the modified code coverage viewer for flex in an automated build to follow the trend of code coverage over time. The trouble with this approach was that there was a problem either with the localConnection in flex or the code that uses it […]

Also posted in Continuous Integration, Flash & Actionscript | 22 Responses

Code Coverage with Flex – ANT build for running the viewer

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: July 25, 2009

In my last post, I gave you my elegant extension hack for generating EMMA style code coverage reports from FlexCover. This post covers the first route I took to incorporating this in my build process. It does work, but it’s not very consistent in its reporting and I’ll explain why at the end…

Also posted in Continuous Integration, Flash & Actionscript | 5 Responses

Code Coverage with Flex – creating EMMA formatted reports

By Paul Barnes-Hoggett | Published: July 24, 2009

Details on my hack for creating EMMA formatted code coverage reports using FlexUnit

Also posted in Continuous Integration, Flash & Actionscript | 5 Responses