All software should be rigorously tested, during the development process, and before it is released. Automated testing helps software developers, testing teams and quality control (QC) teams perform comprehensive and effective testing, and find bugs quickly. This new book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf (in the Facets of Ruby Series) documents and demonstrates how to use the Ruby scripting language to test user interfaces reliably and repeatedly. The book covers a wide scope of testing needs, including techniques for scripted testing of MS-Windows GUIs, Java platform GUIs (for Linux, Mac, Windows, and others), or for web applications.

Book cover - Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby

This book is a practical, quick moving tutorial based on real life, and real-world GUI applications.  Author Ian Dees says, “This is the book I wish I had four years ago. That’s when I faced the equally unpleasant task of fixing old, broken GUI tests and coaxing a rickety third-party toolkit into running new tests. I started looking for a how-to guide on GUI testing to help me down this road. Unfortunately, there were none.”  So Ian wrote the book he was wishing for.

Mr. Dees points out in the introduction (p.4) that many developers and software professionals have been suspicious or skeptical about test driven development (TDD). However, as he points out, “the important idea in TDD wasn’t the tests; it was the fact that writing the tests forces developers to think through how their code will behave.” After TDD, some people shifted their thought process, and began to speak of “behavior driven development” (BDD).  As it turns out, Ruby is a very powerful and expressive language for scripting tests, and RSpec is a special Ruby tool in the Ruby coders toolbox. “RSpec was the first Ruby implementation of the ideas behind BDD.”

Many examples and test scripts are sprinkled throughout the book.

Chapter 2 covers some simple examples with MS-Windows, and Java Swing (the original Sun Java GUI widgets) with JRuby and lays a nice foundation for the variety of tests that can be performed with Ruby.

Chapter 3 provides more in depth coverage of how to use RSpec, which is a Ruby gem (or library), that turns Ruby into a powerful (yet simple) test description language. RSpec notation uses words like “describe” – for describing the test, and “should” – a verb for describing how if the test passes or fails.

Chapter 4 provides details on how to simplify your testing, and Chapter 5 provides many examples for special cases like testing passwords, wrangling documents, cutting and pasting, or searching and replacing  (all under Ruby script control) to exercise many different tests of your application.

Chapter 6 and 7 provide more details about testing many kinds of apps, testing your tests, testing keystrokes, menus, mouse-clicks, and how to introduce randomness into the testing scenario.  Chapter 8 delves into using FIT (Ward Cunningham’s Framework for Integrated Testing). Fortunately, there is a Ruby gem for FIT testing also, and Mr. Dees demonstrates how easy it is to utilize simple HTML tables to visualize your testing.

Chapter 9 moves into testing web applications by impersonating a browser, parsing the HTML, or driving the actual browser to perform specific behaviors. There are several great pointers and examples on how to use Selenium, and Selenium with RSpec, and example scenarios with AJAX also (going way beyond the simple HTML page load tests). Another great Ruby browser/web-site testing tool called Watir (Web Application Testing in Ruby) is also described. This is a great chapter. The testing techniques in chapter 9 are worth the price of the book, so if you buy the book, and only read chapter 9, you will be receiving great value.

The book has several more chapters describing RSpec Story Runner, specialized testing on the MAC, and alternate GUI testing for the MS-Windows platform, with Win32::GuiTest. The book concludes with a bibliography, nice summary of resources, and helpful websites related to Ruby and software testing, and an index of contents in the book.

Bonus: Rails Podcasts has an MP3 you can download – an interview with author Ian Dees about Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby.

Ruby on Rails - Architecture

Ruby on Rails Architectural Diagram – from Niwatori image-photo-stream on Picasa

Tim Bray took a break from his other stuff to run more RSpec tests. Is he RESTing or testing, or both at the same time? He’s misusing RSpec (like Andy McKee abuses the guitar) — and that kind of innovation could lead to a cool new invention — but only if he plays with it long enough to discover something new and interesting.

Obie Fernandez is pushing paired programming the HashRocket way. Looks like they are having fun with it, and getting some good results. True believers in agile programming methods are already doing this, and everyone else is watching it closely, or closing their eyes, and trying to ignore it with one pragmatic eye still open.

David H. Hansson was not really “thinking out loud”, but he recently twittered:

getdropbox.com is exactly what I need to complete the two computer conundrum. Great execution. Can’t wait to be able to pay for it.

DHH also released Rails 2.1.1 — with lots of little bug fixes.

Dave Thomas is having fun with procs in Ruby 1.9

Michael Galpin talked about rapid prototyping with Apache Derby and JRuby on Rails over on IBM developerworks.

Did I mention that JRuby 1.1.4 was released? –  with a 2-20x increase in speed for most features

John Lam (the Microsoft IronRuby guy) helps you connect the dots and solve the really big problems in this video captured at the last RubyFringe.

Nick Sieger talks about jazzing things up with JRuby in this InfoQ video interview.

… and from the awesome fresh news department … enjoy the awesome fresh rails documentation.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner at CIO Magazine, interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks the dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then.

… and discussion of the article continues at Slashdot.

I was thinking about using the word Scriptology, but a gentleman (Dr. Adam Blatner)  was already using the word Scriptology to talk about the Lore of Writing Systems and Alphabets. Not to mention, that the FileMaker people have a website for FileMaker templates called Scriptology also.

Since I’m very interested in multiple computer languages, some people might call me a polyglot. I was thinking about calling the new knowledge category PolyCompuScriptology, but that failed my terse test.

Scene 2: TechCrunch posts an article telling the world about your cool RoR Open Source Social Networking stuff. This is great free publicity, but can your application handle the TechCrunch effect? Will your RoR Social Networking application be able to handle the spike in traffic? Can you handle the success of becoming a very popular new application? (Rumor mill… Twitter is having scaling problems… said to be abandoning Ruby on Rails. However DHH, the master architect of RoR, joined Twitter as D2H on 29-Apr-2008, and instantly had over 1200 followers.)

Scene 3: Slashdot comes back online after being down for 5 hours, and someone posts an article about your hot beta site — sez its cool. Will it suffer from the Slashdot effect? How will your application perform under peak load? Does it scale up to handle thousands or millions of hits per hour?

Scene 4: You can’t handle the TechCrunch effect and Slashdot effect all on the same day. Your web site crashes and burns. Your dream, website, and reputation is ruined — all in one day.

Scene 5: You wake up from the nightmare. It was only dream. It’s morning. You make some coffee and read the technology news. You check out the new Ruby on Rails performance monitoring tool from New Relic, and you listen to the Mashable podcast interview of Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic. Lew says they wrote the New Relic performance monitoring tool using Ruby, so he’s proud to say they eat their own dog food.

Scene 6: You get back to work — a little wiser.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

The video is kind of funny, and does reveal some tidbits of truth about the complexity of enterprise java development. But those who have been reading about Ruby and JRuby for a while realize that you can run Ruby and Ruby On Rails with Java.

But if you think about it… guess that goes to show you there’s a-lotta-truth here.

1. the Mongrel parser, the root of Mongrel speed and security
2. Event Machine, I/O library with high scalability, performance and stability
3. Rack, a minimal interface between webservers and Ruby frameworks

So, Thin is the new dog in town. Did I mention that Thin is fast and flexible?

Thank-you Marc Cournoyer !

Ruby, Duby, Doo – da, da, da – Ruby, Duby, Doo