Atomic Spin :: Elements of Software

Atomic and our developers invest a lot of time in professional development. Everyone attends at least one conference or workshop each year. This year we presented at or attended the following:

• Austin Workshop on Test Automation
• Embedded Systems Conference
• Rails Conference
• Dr. Dobb’s Architecture and Design World
• Agile Conference
• O’Reilly Open Source Convention
• Google Test Automation Conference
• Ruby Conference

The October meeting of XP West Michigan featured “what I did on my summer vacation” talks from Atomic Object developers. Five atoms gave short, informal talks on interesting things they learned at recent conferences. Read the rest of this entry

Patrick Copeland gave a presentation at GTAC 2007 about Google’s approach to testing. Most importantly Google focuses on developer testing. Rather than set up software testing teams for each development team, they promote unit testing, automation tool building and developer responsibility for test suite quality. In order to disseminate these ideas, they created what they call the “Test-Certified Ladder”. It suggests a set of small steps to get any development team going on testing:

1. Setup testing tools
2. Learn technologies and techniques
3. Improve test suites

Google also has what they call “Test Mercenaries”. These are specialized teams of dev-testers that arrange time-boxed relationships with development teams to help them improve their tests. Often pairing directly with their partner teams, these mercenaries have a few responsibilities:

1. Introduce new technologies
2. Refactor code
3. Train developers

Finally, Google has a number of methods to disseminate testing knowledge throughout their company:

• Testing on the Toilet: restroom postings of new test technologies, test suite reports, etc.
• Testapalooza: all-day conference where testing ideas from across the whole company can converse.
• Code Green: a monthly magazine-style internal publication, specific to testing at Google

Every presentation from GTAC 2007 is available online at youtube.com.

Greg and I have been working on an embedded project for one of AO’s longtime clients X-Rite. At the beginning of the project our team (X-Rite + AO) set up a dedicated build server with cruisecontrol.rb and a custom-made build status indicator.

Our build indicator is an upside-down ceiling fan globe with a small microcontroller and super powerful LEDs inside. It goes blue when newly checked-in code triggers a build, and then it displays either green for tests passing or red for tests failing at the conclusion of that build (and all of the engineering department can see it).

Just recently our X-Rite project manager Scott came over and upgraded our build status light for Halloween. We’re pretty sure it’s our automated unit and system tests that will keep evil spirits away, but every little bit helps…