Archive for January, 2009

Screencast: an introduction to Web Application Testing In Ruby

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

After an exquisite amount of procrastination, alteration and working around defects, I’ve finally completed my first screencast.

The screencast covers an introduction to WATIR - Web Application Testing In Ruby. This is an open source library for programmativally driving web browsers. I have made considerable use of professionally and really value all of the hard work invested in to it and the community which supports it. It is a superb tool for writing automated testing, demonstration and data loading scripts and is very easy to extend and customise.

These screencasts are in m4v format and should play using Quicktime. I’ve not tried playing them in anything else. Please let me know if there are any issues or improvements I could make.

Downloads:

Drop-down terminal for Mac OS X

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

Visor (http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-visor/) makes an excellent addition to the default Terminal.app on Mac OS X, allowing the terminal to drop down when you need it.

PRINCE2 - Getting things done.

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

I’m currently reading about PRINCE2 to prepare myself for a new project. Whilst reading chapter 4 of the practitioner’s guide (Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2) I came upon the following:

“To get anything done in the project, you need a decision maker and someone to undertake the planning.”

I believe this should be rephrased as:

“To get anything done in the project, you need a decision maker and someone to do the work.”

Planning will not ensure that something is done. Planning should be an essential part of one’s work. Whilst planning is important, there really is no substitute for doing.