Comments on Andrzej on Software: Continuous integration - some tips

haha, a trophy, nice! Wouldn't work well in d...

2011-12-08T19:22:50.533+01:00

haha, a trophy, nice!

Wouldn't work well in distributed teams, though. Maybe changing twitter avatar to something embarrassing? :)

About making sure people don't leave builds in...

2011-12-08T19:08:08.929+01:00

About making sure people don't leave builds in a broken state, we stole an idea from something I read about on a NetBeans developpers forum. They use an ugly looking piece of pottery that acts as a trophy for the last person who broke the build. Quite effective! Not having any pottery on hand, we are using a Origami pig for that. The person gets to keep it on its desk until the next person breaks something.

Thanks Andrzej!

2011-12-07T01:23:36.013+01:00

Thanks Andrzej!

Pedro: Yeah, I agree, medium projects should also ...

2011-12-06T11:30:39.808+01:00

Pedro: Yeah, I agree, medium projects should also have a CI. I think every project that involves more than 1 person would gain from CI. Single-dev projects also.

Interesting idea with you CI tool. I'm sure it will be useful!

We use Jenkins for our Rails projects.

michal: We've been trying to convert Selenium ...

2011-12-06T11:28:59.887+01:00

michal: We've been trying to convert Selenium tests to Webkit, but we failed. It didn't see some texts that were clearly visible on the screen. Did you have similar problems?

You mention "every non-basic" project. I...

2011-12-06T11:24:39.416+01:00

You mention "every non-basic" project. I happen to think there is a huge gap needing to be filled, in bringing CI practices to all those smaller to medium web projects. About 80% of all web projects, basically. I've authored Cintient, an open-source, PHP based, self-hosted CI server. It's made to be dead simple, and hopefully turn around this generalized misconception that CI is only justified on more complex or big projects. Oh, the link: https://github.com/matamouros/cintient.

I agree with everything you said here. We've...

2011-12-06T04:09:54.626+01:00

I agree with everything you said here.

We've been using jasmine together with sinonjs (http://sinonjs.org/) to test our front-end.

We've been also experimenting with capybara-webkit https://github.com/thoughtbot/capybara-webkit to skip selenium all together.

Hey Michael, The front-end acceptance tests (with...

2011-12-06T02:25:35.568+01:00

Hey Michael,

The front-end acceptance tests (with a real browser, but the "server" is stubbed out) can take seconds, literally.

The server API tests can also be very fast. That gives us 2-3 minutes for the full-integration tests (with Selenium). It's enough for the most important parts of the code.

Ah, now I see your comment about Selenium being sl...

2011-12-06T02:21:39.809+01:00

Ah, now I see your comment about Selenium being slow and unreliable. Your suggested solution is to separate out tests for the backend and client side. Does that mean you typically *don't* have end-to-end tests on a new project?

We've found the new WebDriver interface to Selenium 2 much more reliable by the way.

Can you keep your end-to-end functional tests (rea...

2011-12-06T02:19:25.622+01:00

Can you keep your end-to-end functional tests (real database, using selenium) running in under 3 minutes?