July Meeting Announcement (Note the date change!): Acceptance Testing With Selenium & Cucumber

***** Date Change *****
To avoid Independence Day conflicts and to pull in a great speaker, we've moved this month's meeting to Friday July 24th. Same time. Same place.
***** Date Change *****

Abstract:
Unit testing is an important part of your development cycle, but acceptance testing ensures your software meets your project’s requirements. This session shows you two great tools to help write automated acceptance tests: Selenium and Cucumber. You’ll learn how to use these tools to start from a requirement and move through a user story to an acceptance test. You’ll see how Selenium IDE cuts your development time by recording tests automatically for you, and you’ll discover how Selenium RC lets you use one set of tests to evaluate multiple browsers. Finally, we’ll walk through using Cucumber to write a plain-text description on how your system should behave – and use that same file to drive an acceptance test! We’ll discuss how these tools fit in your development process, and how they can be included in automated builds. This session will leave you with an understanding of how these tools can help you boost your quality and ensure you’re meeting your system’s functional requirements.

Biography:
Jim Holmes. Father. Husband. Geek. Veteran. Over 20 years IT experience. Co-author of “Windows Developer Power Tools.” Coffee Roaster. MVP for C#. Chief Cat Herder of the CodeMash Conference. Liked 5th grade so much he did it twice. One-time setter, middle blocker, and weakside hitter. Blogger (http://FrazzledDad.com). Program Manager for Telligent Systems, makers of Community Server and other neat products. Big fan of naps.

May Meeting Recap: Essentials of the Rational Unified Process with Nilesh Prabhu

Thanks to Nilesh Prabhu for delivering Essentials of the Rational Unifed Process (RUP). He made us think and facilitated an intriguing discussion. The slide deck is here.

Also thanks to Cardinal Solutions for sponsoring the meeting.

Links to topics discussed:
Rational Software Architect
Rational Software Modeler
Rational Application Developer
Open Unified Process (OpenUP)
Rational and Eclipse

Thanks for coming. We'll see you at the next meeting July 9th (Note change of date to avoid Independence Day weekend.)

Cardinal Solutions Sponsoring May 7th COALMG Meeting

Cardinal Solutions, a VSTS Inner Circle Microsoft Gold partner, will provide pizza and drinks for the next COALMG meeting on May 7th. Pizza will arrive at 5:45PM.

May Meeting Announcement: Essentials of the Rational Unified Process

Join us for an overview of the essentials of Rational Unified Process or “The RUP”. Whether you are an IT manager, project manager or team member, this Lunch and Learn has been designed to provide a better understanding of RUP’s iterative software development lifecycle and terminology.

Topics Discussed Will Include:

• The Definition of a Process
• Benefits of the RUP
• RUP’s Framework
• The Phases of the RUP
• The Disciplines of the RUP
• Processes & Tools
• Common Errors

Nilesh Prabhu is a PMP and RUP certified Principal Consultant at Cardinal Solution Group. He has worn many hats in his career, providing guidance as a business analyst, in the roles of process engineer and test lead. He has also worked as a tester, test designer, SME, functional lead and programmer. His experience runs the gamut of the manufacturing, pension, financial and insurance industries.

March Meeting Recap: Kanban with Tim Wingfield

Thanks Tim Wingfield for delivering Kanban with the Presentation Zen-style deck. An enjoyable and engaging discussion ensued. Tim posted the slides on his blog.

Also thanks to Quick Solutions for sponsoring the food.

Join us next month as we continue our methodology series with the Rational Unified Process (RUP).

March Meeting Announcement: A little bit of Lean with Kanban

*** We return to our normal meeting date and time: Thursday March 5th at the Microsoft Polaris MPR from 6PM-8PM ***

Pizza and drinks will be provided by QSI.

A little bit of Lean with Kanban
In our industry’s continual effort to find a better way to provide software solutions, Lean software development practices are gaining some momentum. Kanban is one part of Lean, and one I’ve used to provide value to my team and my clients in a very short time. I’ll share some of my experiences with Kanban, and help you generate some ideas on places you can use it.

Tim Wingfield
Tim has been involved in web design and development for over 10 years. For the last five years Tim has been a developer with the Business Solutions Group at Quick Solutions Inc. in Columbus, OH. Tim has a wide range of knowledge in .Net but focuses on the user interface and the user experience in ASP.Net applications. Recently he has put more time into studying development processes and how to more efficiently create quality software. In what time is left over, Tim enjoys coaching his sons’ hockey teams, playing a little hockey himself, and traveling with his family.

You may find presentation follow up here.

Microsoft presents: Central Ohio: Application Lifecycle Management Briefings: Follow-up

Thanks to all those attending the SDLC in a Box ALM Briefing event held on 2/05 at the Microsoft Polaris offices. Also, thanks to our sponsors: Microsoft, Quick Solutions and Cardinal Solutions. Finally, a special thanks to the organizers and contributors: Danilo Casino, Brian Cassidy, Brian Prince, Mike Gresley and David Baliles.

The presenters Alexei Govorine (Quick Solutions) and Jeff Hunsaker (Cardinal Solutions) follow-up with the slide deck, ALM/VSTS materials, inquiry responses and topics discussed below:

PRESENTATIONS:

SDLC Day 1

Business Value of TFS

SDLC Day 2

ALM/VSTS MATERIALS:

ALM Catalyst Brochure

ALM Catalyst Guide

DevTools Promotion

QUESTION AND ANSWER:

Q. Is there a user-level check-in authorization feature?
Yes. Within Source Control Explorer, right-mouse on a given node in the hierarchy selecting Properties. Within this dialog, one can Allow or Deny various actions by a TFS group. One of these actions is Check In.

Q. Does Code Metrics work for .Net 1.1 solutions?
A. I wasn't able to find a definitive answer but I'm fairly certain this is only possible for .Net 2.0+ solutions. Code Metrics is only available in Visual Studio 2008 so just loading up a .Net 1.1 solution will invoke an upgrade. NDepend may provide an alternative to analyze code and produce metrics for a .Net 1.1 solution. (Aside: One of the best write-ups on Code Metrics for Visual Studio 2008.)

Q. Does VSTS find dead (never invoked, inaccessible) code?
Not explicitly. Code Analysis (or FxCop) will identify uncalled private methods (but not public) as well as unused parameters within methods. However, a tool such as NDepend or JetBrains Resharper may provide further functionality. Good write-up on removing dead code.

Q. Can I integrate Code Profiler into the build?
Yes! Instructions here. Solid write-up on Code Profiler.

Q. How compare test results (pass/fail) across builds?
The "Regressions" report, which is out of the box for the MSF CMMI process template, will reveal this data. All TFS out of the box reports are detailed here. (From "patterns & practices: Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server": Regressions. What tests passed at one point but are now failing? This report shows a list of all the tests that passed previously and now are failing. This report is available in MSF CMMI.)

Q. Where can I find explainations of the various reports within the MSF process templates?
Within Process Guidance on the portal, select the Index top tab, then select the left link entitled "Reports".

LINKS:

• VSTS / TFS 2008 SP1 Virtual PC
• PDC
• CodePlex
• Branching Guidance
• Branching visualizer
• Check-in Policy Pack
• Channel 9: 10-4 (Visual Studio 2010; .Net 4.0) videos
• PEX - Automated white box testing for .Net (VS 2010)