Sebastian Nohn
Weblog
MySQL & Skoll DCQA
On GTAC 2006 (which was called LTAC in those days), I met Adam Porter, professor at UMD and heard his talk about his project Skoll. Skoll is a system for continuously assuring the quality of software under different configurations while intelligently choosing which to run and thus basically saving time. Amazing stuff!
During that time, MySQL was looking for an easy way to integrate more people from their community into their QA process and started the MySQL Build Farm Initiative. Adam was searching for open source projects to demonstrate his technology on. So I brought them together.
This year's GTAC, UMD and MySQL launched the first beta of that project. Anyone running some UNIX-Flavour can and is encouraged to participate by running the Skoll community client. Now that the conference is over for some weeks, the first results are available.
Posted Nov 01, 2007
Tagged as: Build Farm, GTAC, MySQL, Skoll, Software Quality
GTAC 2007
This year's Google Testing Automation Conference ended last Saturday. The people and talks were even more interesting that on last year's conference. Thanks to Allen, Amy and Susan for organizing such a great event!
The talks are online:
As well some official pictures (and unofficial ones on various photo storage sites), other attendees feedback, some links in the backlog.
A lot more stuff may be online. If you are curious: The official tag is gtac.
GTAC 2008 will take place in Hyderabad, India Seattle and I'm looking forward to it!
Posted Sep 01, 2007
Tagged as: Conference, GTAC, Software Quality
PHP on Cruise - Assuring compatibility with new PHP versions
Assuring compatibility with new PHP versions is not always easy: Features are added and changed in minor versions, bugs you didn't even know they exist and having been open for years "suddenly" get fixed. Sometimes BC breaks are inevitable. On the other hand there are no bug fix-only or security fix-only releases, so you are more or less forced to regularly update your PHP.
Assuring compatibility however is easy with a little help of CruiseControl as long as you have automated tests for your software: PHP on Cruise
Basically, PHP on Cruise fetches the latest version of the CVS (stable) tree, compiles it with your standard configure options and runs your tests. If these tests pass, you should be fine with the next version. If these tests fail, either PHP has been broken, or your application uses deprecated stuff or uses bugs as features. If the latter is the case, you have enough time to fix your application (you should by the way think about setting up continuous builds for your own project). If not, you should report the issue at bugs.php.net to make PHP better.
Making PHP better is another issue to publish this little howto: Although PHP QA has evolved in the last two years by heavily improving the test coverage with the help of gcov there are still several things to improve: Broaden the tests and broaden the test base. PHP on Cruise helps with that by allowing everyone to run his own tests on his own platform in his own configuration without investing too much time.
Posted Apr 15, 2007
Tagged as: CruiseControl, PHP, Software Development, Software Quality
Firefox 2 changed to the worse
Example 1: Closing Tabs
(Yes, I know [CTRL]-[T])
Example 2: Clearing Private Data
Posted Oct 26, 2006
Tagged as: Firefox, Rant, Software Quality
Selenium extension for PHPUnit has arrived.
The Selenium Extension for PHPUnit has arrived.
Posted Oct 04, 2006
Tagged as: PHP, PHPUnit, Selenium, Software Quality
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