We just had some customers report a bug. Not good. We didn’t get an exception email. All the tests passed. We couldn’t see anything untoward in the log files. But it was there. We could reproduce it, both in staging and in production. Not good at all.
But the weirdest thing was we couldn’t [...]

Writing estimates up-front is a really tricky part of client work.
From the customer’s point of view it’s pretty essential. You need to know how much you are spending before the work begins so you don’t get stung.
From the developer’s point of view it’s pretty difficult to do because [...]

I have just written a load of test code that needed to verify that a particular set of classes behaved correctly when a transaction was rolled back.
However, the rest of my suite relied on transactional fixtures (which is Rails’ badly named way of saying that a transaction is started before each test and [...]

When you’ve got an application that has little or no test coverage it can be quite daunting making changes. What if you alter X and it breaks Y? Without running through the entire app by hand how will you know what you’ve broken?
Well you won’t.
Even worse, what if your [...]

Lesson learnt today.
Apparently, underscores are not part of the standard for a host name. However, your browser (and DNS server and all the links in between) will accept underscores in the host name.
But, when you have Safari set to “only accept cookies for sites that I visit” the underscore in [...]

One of the issues when using Selenium or Watir to power your full-stack acceptance testing (apart from the time it takes for the test suite to run), is that stuff happens within your browser, fails and then Cucumber happily moves on to the next test before you get a chance to look at what went [...]

I think Cucumber is fast becoming indispensable for my testing. The point of it is that you can write documentation that your client understands and then prove that the application does what it says. When coupled with WATIR you can show that it really works in an actual browser – you can even [...]

I’ve recently been updating some old code – partly written by someone else, partly written by myself. At the time, I thought I had written this code really well; looking back on it now, it looks awful. Fair enough, I’ve learnt a lot – I want to look back on old code and [...]

There seems to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about the upcoming VAT change. Especially as it is only a 13 month change and the rate will revert to 17.5% in 2010.
However, it ought to be really simple (although I realise that this may be a bit late for [...]

I’ve written up a new post at the Brightbox blog detailing how we are using RSpec and Cucumber to build acceptance tests for the next generation Brightbox systems.