Yesterday I was at Zagreb STC MeetUp #2. It was organized by Karlo Šmid at Ericsson Nikola Tesla.

After the first meetup (which was great) I thought the second one could be only worse. But to my great surprise, it was even better than the first one!

About ten of us appeared. Pizza was already there, so we started talking informally while eating pizza. (We even had a snack and refreshment sponsor, Calyx.)

Karlo brought a few books, I brought a few and we organized a little library. I think I got a pretty good deal, I borrowed a few good books:

• Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing by Gerald M. Weinberg
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Cem Kaner, James Bach and Bret Pettichord
• Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk and Hung Q. Nguyen

(Book reviews coming soon.)

While we were still eating pizza, Karlo had a talk about The Grinder, a Java Load Testing Framework. After that I talked about Watir (automated testing that doesn’t hurt), Cucumber (making BDD fun) and Sikuli (automate anything you see) and how I use them together.

A really important part of every meetup are informal conversations in pairs or small groups, and we also had plenty of those.

A really good meetup. If you have a chance to attend the next one, I would highly recommend it.

Agile Testing: The Book

TL;DR: It is a good book.

I won the Agile Testing book in lottery while I was at The Austin Workshop on Test Automation (AWTA) in Austin, Texas, in January 2009. I have met both authors, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, at AWTA and even recorded a podcast about the book. I was planning to read it since then. But, as it usually goes, I had other things to do. I finally decided I will read the book a few months ago, and I was reading it a few pages a day. While reading it, I had to quickly read another book, so everything is a bit blurry. A few days ago, I have finally read the book.

Probably the most useful part of the book for me was part 3, the agile testing quadrants. It was introduced by Brian Marick way back in 2003, but I do not think I have heard a lot about it until I found it in the book.

I am pretty bad at book reviews, so I will not go into details. There are a lot of reviews at Amazon, if you like to read them.

Thanks for wasting a bunch of my time. Next time, before you publish something you might want to check that it works. I’ve spent 5 hours trying to get this shit to run and I can’t get the dev kit (ruby dk.rb install) to install. A search indicates that I’m not the only one having this issue. WHat a BUSH operation: from Ruby to Watir to YOU.

Please: take your page down — stop wasting peoples’ time.

On your BEST DAY, you’re an IDIOT.

* I am selling the book, but all content is available on GitHub for free. I have spent hundreds of hours on the book so far, and I have earned about $200. Do the math.

Update: I have replied after I updated the instructions.

Hi,

Thanks for the kind words. Since you have asked so nicely, I have just spent another afternoon and evening away from my family, updating instructions on how to install Watir:

https://github.com/zeljkofilipin/watirbook/blob/master/installation/windows.md

I did it just for you, for free of course, as always. Please notice new chapter, DevKit.

Regards,

Željko

I was at Software Testers Speak Up Meeting #1 yesterday at Ericsson Nikola Tesla (in Zagreb, Croatia). It was organized by Karlo Šmid.

It was a good meeting. About 15 of us showed up. We introduced ourselves, talked about what we do, asked questions… After and hour or two talking, pizza arrived but the discussions continued, sometimes in smaller groups or pairs. A really good meeting.

The next one will probably be at the same place in a month or two. We will probably have one or two short 10-20 minute talks the next time. I am really looking forward to it.

If you want to continue the discussion from the meeting, ping Karlo (@karlosmid) or me (@zeljkofilipin) at Twitter, join viaqa Google group or viaqa/Croatian Software Testing Network LinkedIn groups.

Update: Karlo wrote about the meeting too.

Yesterday I was at Ruby at Six #2 at Infinum (in Zagreb, Croatia), organized by Nikica Jokić. About 30 people showed up, like the last time.

There were 4 short talks about NoSQL by Damir Bulić, Coffescript by Josip Bišćan, backbone.js by Tomislav Capan, and Mislav Marohnić was supposed to talk about Git but I think he changed the title of his talk to “except on Internet Explorer“. (You had to be there.)

The talks were interesting, but even more interesting were informal conversations after the talks. There was also free homebrew beer. We went home after 10pm, I think that says how interesting the conversations were.

I think this was one of the best meetups I have ever been. The next one will be next month. I hope Ruby at Six will become a tradition.

If you want to continue the conversation, go to ruby-hr Google group or #rubyat6/#rubyatsix at Twitter.

I have finished reading Jenkins: The Definitive Guide book today. It took me a while to realize there is free pdf version of the book (and $34.99-$49.49 print and ebook versions).

What is Jenkins? From their web site:

In a nutshell Jenkins CI (formerly known as Hudson) is the leading open-source continuous integration server.

The book covers everything you need to know. How to install, use and maintain it. There is also a few chapters about continuous integration in general. I have just scanned chapters on Java specific topics.

I was reading the book and working on setting up Jenkins, just the way I like to learn. First in a virtual machine on my laptop, then on a real server somewhere in Switzerland.

Almost in every chapter I was surprised to learn how powerful Jenkins is. It can do almost anything you need, and all of it can be done from your favorite browser. I plan to write more about how I use Jenkins as soon as I get more experience with it.

At the moment, Jenkins is checking our Git repository every minute. If there are new commits it pulls them and builds the application. If the build is successful it runs a suite of Watir tests. For a while, it was sendin e-mail if build fails to the person that made the last check in. I have disabled it because links in e-mail messages were broken, since Jenkins was installed in a virtual machine on my laptop. I will also investigate distributed builds, if this machine becomes too busy.

The goal is to have automatic builds and one click deploy to production.

At the end, I did not have a lot of trouble installing or using Jenkins, it is pretty straightforward. I had some Git problems, but managed to resolve them. The majority of the work was in adjusting our rake build script to work with Jenkins.

In short, if you need a continuous integration server, I would recommend Jenkins. If you want to read a book about it, I would recommend this book.

Update: managed to clone Git repository via Git/SSH.

Recently I have successfully set up Jenkins CI (called Hudson CI until recently) in Windows 2008 virtual machine. It was not hard once I figured all the stuff that needs to be done, but it was far from trivial. At one point I almost gave up on Jenkins because I could not get it to clone Git repository. But with help from Adam Goucher I was able to get it working. More about that later in the post.

Since then I have been reading Jenkins: The Definitive Guide book and playing with Jenkins in the virtual machine. (By the way, there is free pdf version of the book, and $34.99-$49.49 print and ebook versions.) I am almost done with the book and I plan to write a short review after I read it.

Continuous integration server is not really useful when it is in a virtual machine on my laptop. Neither my laptop nor virtual machine work 24/7, and the point of continuous integration server is exactly that. Running 24/7.

So, today the time was right to get Jenkins working on a server. I am writing this to have a reminder how to set up Jenkins and Git on Windows, so I do not have to repeat setup nightmare ever again.

Jenkins

Jenkins installation is pretty simple and it is covered pretty well, both on the Jenkins web site and in the book. I have installed it as Windows native package, and I made my first mistake there. By default, Jenkins installs in C:\Program Files\Jenkins\ (on 32-bit Windows) or C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins\ (on 64-bit). I am really surprised that they do that. I had so many problems with Jenkins because it was installed in a folder with spaces in name. Install Jenkins in C:\Jenkins. (Ruby installed is smarter. It installs by default in C:\Ruby. But that is another story.)

After the installation, Jenkins will open your default web browser and go to it’s home page, http://localhost:8080/. Another surprise. Since the server is in Switzerland, Internet Explorer language was set to French, and Jenkins was in French. Since I do not know any French, I had to change it to English. Go to Internet Explorer > Tools > Internet Options > General > Languages to change the default language.

Jenkins Build Job

With everything back to a language I know, it is the time to create a new job. Click link New Job. Another warning. Do not use spaces in job names. Jenkins creates folders for each job in C:\Jenkins\jobs, and if you name the job build job, it will create C:\Jenkins\jobs\build job folder. You already know spaces in folder names are a bad idea. Call your job something like build. After entering job name, select Build a free-style software project and click OK. Configure job page opens. Just click Save for now. That is it. You have created a job. It does not do anything for now, but we will get there. By the way, take a look at C:\Jenkins\jobs\build. There is just a config.xml file there for the moment. Do not change it.

Jenkins Git Plugin

The next thing we have to do is to get some source code on the machine. If you did not navigate away from the job page (http://localhost:8080/job/build/), click Configure link. You will notice that Git is not listed under Source Code Management at job configuration page. You have to install a plugin.

Go to Jenkins home page (it is http://localhost:8080/, to get there click Jenkins link in the top-left part of the page) and then click Manage Jenkins > Manage Plugins > Available. Check Git Plugin checkbox and click Install. Check Restart Jenkins when installation is complete and no jobs are running checkbox and wait for Jenkins to restart. This restarting Jenkins step is the strangest part. I am never sure when it has restarted. When I get bored waiting, I just go to Jenkins home page and it usually just works.

Go back to job configuration page, and you will see Git listed under Source Code Management. Click it and enter URL of repository. I will use Git read only URL from watirbook project. So, I will use git://github.com/zeljkofilipin/watirbook.git. Click button Save.

If you have Git installed, you are ready for the first build. It will actually just clone the repository, but it is a start. Click Build Now link. In Build History you will notice the first build. It failed for me. To debug the problem, click the build link (something like Oct 20, 2011 7:57:19 PM) and then Console Output. For me it said Cannot run program "git.exe": CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified.

Git

Time to install Git. Download it from Git home page. On download page select Full installer for official Git for Windows. I did not want to install it in Program Files folder, so I have installed it in C:\Git.

Try building the job again. It failed for me again, with the same error message. To fix the problem, you have to let Jenkins know where to find Git. Go to Jenkins configuration (Jenkins > Manage Jenkins) and click Configure System (Do not confuse it with job configuration at job > Configure.)

Under Path to Git executable you will see something like this: There's no such executable git.exe in PATH.... Replace git.exe with C:\Git\cmd\git.cmd and click button Save.

Do not replace git.exe with C:\Git\bin\git.exe. Cloning repositories via Git/SSH will not work. Do not ask. I have spent an entire day on that.

Go back to Configure System page, and if you did everything right, there should not be any error message under Path to Git executable. Leave the page open for 5-10 seconds. I have noticed that sometimes the error message does not appear immediately.

Go back to the job and build it again. It should work now. Finally. You will notice blue ball next to the newest build (instead of red ball for failing builds). I am not sure why they use blue for passing builds when green is a convention. But, there is a fix for that. Install Green Balls plugin (Jenkins > Manage Jenkins > Manage Plugins > Available > Green Balls> Install > Restart Jenkins.) If you do not see the green balls, click ctrl+f5 to refresh the page.

The Fun Starts Here

The fun starts if you want to clone Git repository that is not public. Change repository URL to git@github.com:zeljkofilipin/watirbook.git. Build again. Console Output page was stuck for me at Cloning repository origin for a long time. You can cancel the build by clicking red x button in the top-right corner of the Console Output page. You will get the whole error message then. It said ERROR: Could not clone repository. I am not surprised since I did not even set up this machine for Git/SSH authentication.

Go to Start > Git GUI > Help > Show SSH key > Generate Key. When it asks for passphrase, leave it empty. Copy the key to clipboard and close Git GUI.

At GitHub go to Account Settings > SSH Public Keys > Add another public key. Enter something in Title, paste the key in Key and click Add key.

(If you are using Unfuddle go to Personal Settings > Public Keys > New Public Key…. Enter something in Title, paste the key in Value and click Add.)

Sometimes it takes a couple of minutes for the key to become valid.

Test the Git setup by opening Command Prompt and cloning the repository there. So, go to your Desktop folder in Command Prompt and clone the repository. Example for my watirbook repository would be:

git clone git@github.com:zeljkofilipin/watirbook.git

If Git complains that The authenticity of host can't be established, type yes when it asks Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no).

Everything worked just fine from the command line. Now I have Git repository at my desktop. But I want it in Jenkins. Try to build the job from Jenkins again. It still does not work. The same error message as the last time. This is the part where I almost gave up. The problem is that you have set Git/SSH authentication to work for your user (zfilipin in my case). But Jenkins is using Git as Local System Account instead of using it as zfilipin.

To fix this go to Start > Services > Jenkins > right click > Properties > Log On > This account, enter username and password and click OK. Restart Jenkins service (right click > Restart). When I was trying this in virtual machine, my user did not have any password, so this did not work. The workaround is to create a password for the user.

Try building the job again. Everything should work just fine.

Of course, I have immediately took a look at Watir Code Analysis.

Some of the highlights:

Jarmo Pertman contributed the most in the last year.

Hugh McGowan was pretty busy recently, too.

Bret Pettichord, Paul Rogers and Jarmo Pertman have contributed the most code in the project life time.

For more details, go to Watir Code Analysis page.

Crossposted at watir.com.

Nice people from The Testing Planet have published my article About Watir – An Introduction. It is an extract from a book I am writing on Watir. More articles about Watir should appear at The Testing Planet soon.

Crossposted at watir.com.

You can download the free version of the book from GitHub for free.

You can buy the whole book via PayPal for 9$. Since the book is not finished yet, you will get all updates to the book for free. If you already bought the book, I have sent it to you via e-mail.

Major changes since the last release:

- driving opera on Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5

You can see all the changes at GitHub.

Release 0.7 (September 17) had 156 downloads. Not bad.

One person bought the book this month. If two more people buy the book this month, I will buy Mac OS X 10.7 and cover installation for it.