Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'software' articles

Telling stories with RSpec

Edd Dumbill — 2008-01-12T13:14:43Z

For a while now I've been writing RSpec specifications to test Expectnation, rather than "traditional" Rails unit tests. Although I don't completely get the Behaviour Driven Development hype around RSpec, I do find that it helps in writing more literate and maintainable test suites.

Until very recently, however, RSpec for Rails had no decent answer to Rails' integration tests. Integration tests enable the testing of compete scenarios, as opposed to the specific testing of methods or single HTTP operations that unit and functional testing provide.

For instance, our integration test suite for Expectnation tests things such as "a user tries to submit a proposal, is redirected to the account sign up page, signs up, and then is redirected to the proposal submission page". This involves multiple steps, and the whole suite of tests necessitates a lot of reuse.

The need for reuse resulted in trying to construct a DSL-like set of methods for each step, such as "user logs in with email X and password Y". It has gotten a bit tangled, especially when looking at test failures to see what's really gone wrong.

After a while, unravelling the test suite starts to feel like unpacking Christmas lights. (Photo: shoothead)

RSpec Story Framework

My problems with integration tests made the Story Framework, newly available in RSpec 1.1, look very interesting. Based around plain text descriptions of application behaviour, it lets you write integration tests with good reuse and good diagnostic reporting.

For example, here's a story I wrote to check the login process.

Story: login as an existing user
        As an unauthenticated user
        I want to log in to Expectnation
        So I can see my account details

        Scenario: login details are correct
                Given an event provider
                And my test@example.org account
                When I log in with email test@example.org and password foofoo
                Then I will be logged in
                And I will be shown the account page

The words such as "Given", "When" and "Then" are cues to the story runner to execute some code. Behind the story sits a collection of steps. Here's a couple of steps from this test:

Given "my $email account" do |email|
    @user = find_or_create_user_by_email({:email => email,
      :password => 'foofoo',
      :password_confirmation => 'foofoo'})
end

When "I log in with email $email and
                         password $password" do |email, password|
    post '/user/account/authenticate',
      :user => {:email => email, :password => password}
end

Notice how a clever bit of string matching allows you to pass parameters from the story prose.

With a small bit of bolting together, the prose stories are then run as code and the tests executed. One nice touch is that if you write a story which doesn't yet have code behind it, it is marked not as a pass or fail, but as pending, which means you can sit down and write all your stories and then get to coding the steps later. This beats writing empty tests which transparently pass.

To conclude, the RSpec Story Framework offers these advantages over Rails' integration tests:

Text-only stories makes it very easy to write and understand tests
The construction of steps for each line makes it easy and maintainable to construct reusable components for the tests

Launching Expectnation

Edd Dumbill — 2007-06-01T15:04:46Z

I'm very pleased to announce the launch of Expectnation, a web application for managing conferences.

What does it do?

Expectnation is intended to replace the ad-hoc collection of emails, spreadsheets, documents and hacks that hold together the organization of most conferences. The aim is to improve the quality and reliability of communication between the organizers, speakers and attendees.

But it doesn't stop there. What I'm really excited about is the chance to enhance the conference experience through the web. Expectnation is capable of managing the complete web site for a conference, which provides many opportunities for bringing the best of the social software world to augment events.

Our tagline is "build your conference into a community", which underpins a key aim: to help organizers make events more relevant and useful to attendees, and to live on beyond the event itself. We do this in two ways: saving time, so you can spend it on improving your conference, and providing online tools to support community building.

Right now Expectnation is able to manage the proposal, review, scheduling and publication of presentations, along with the conference web site and smart emailing to speakers, reviewers and chairs. Over the next two months we'll be introducing our registration module, with optional online payments, and working on extending the social software features available for attendees.

Take a look

I'm really excited about letting users get started with Expectnation, and seeing the uses it gets put to. We believe Expectnation will be just as handy for organizing events inside an organization as for traditional conferences.

So, if you organize, speak at, or attend conferences of any sort, please check out Expectnation and recommend it to a conference organizer near you!

Related links

Expectnation tour complete with screenshots
Previous posts I've written about Expectnation
XTech 2007 was completely managed inside Expectnation

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New release of XmlIndexer search server

Edd Dumbill — 2006-11-24T15:24:34Z

About 18 months or so ago I released the first version of XmlIndexer, a general purpose XML indexing web service based on Mono and Lucene.Net.

I'm happy to announce now version 0.4 of this software which, thanks to improvements in Lucene.Net and patches from the Beagle hackers, is a lot more stable. Previous versions had some nasty locking issues that could kill the server quite dead.

XmlIndexer is a simple indexer. Given a rulefile that maps XPaths to Lucene keys, it can be taught to index any XML file you should care to give it. I use it to provide search functionality to legacy applications, which then need only to expose their data as XML and call a few simple web services to perform a search.

Of related interest is the new Apache Incubator Solr project, which provides a fancy search server based on Lucene, doing the same as my indexer, and much more.

XmlIndexer requires Lucene.Net version 1.9.1. For extra points, apply the locking patches from Beagle to Lucene.Net before building. As a courtesy I include a Lucene.Net DLL I made this way in the download.

Download: searchxml-0.4.tar.gz

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Opinions and free software

Edd Dumbill — 2005-11-22T09:14:31Z

Since interviewing the creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, I've been thinking a little more about what he calls "opinionated software."

That handy little phrase seems to sum up what attracts me to a lot of technology, at all levels.

What I like

Free software--it's not really economics that drew me to free software, but the principles and aims. When you release or use free software, you're exercising your right to free speech and adding your voice to an argument.

Desktop environments--GNOME 2.0: The move from GNOME 1.0 to version 2.0 was highly opinionated (Mac users, think OS 9 to OS X). Complexity of user interface was thrown out in favour of sensible defaults.

Web standards--CSS, RDF, XHTML: not only is there a right way to do things, but it turns out to be better too! I don't automatically fall in love with everything that emerges from the W3C, but some things are so obviously the right way it's impossible not to love them--warts and all.

Muine music player--this player throws out the paraphernalia of iTunes clones and gets you close to the music. Queue, play. What I want to do.

Epiphany web browser--a simple text bar does for bookmark lookup, search and URLs. The bookmarks work like del.icio.us tags. Despite the lure of Firefox extensions, simplicity and efficiency keeps me with Epiphany.

Make friends and enemies

The thing about opinions is that people are inclined to disagree with them. Opinions won't please everybody and, being opinionated, you will never carry everybody with you.

But opinions give you something with which to scythe through indifference. In both my writing and software development work taking a particular stance enables me to create interest, and gives direction to my projects. I tend to get bored easily, and if I'm bored, then my readers and users will never make it.

Being opinionated in software development is easier when there's a strong leader, or it's a one-person project. It's more of a dilemma if you're running a free software project with multiple contributors.

Such projects need such contributions, but run a risk of losing focus and style. I think that there we need to be brave again. If being opinionated means losing potential users, it also means losing potential contributors.

Opinions help in dealing with users, too. It's obvious that the mere act of listening to users isn't good enough. They often won't say what they mean, or their requests mask a deeper issue. How often have you given your boss exactly what he asked for, to find it wasn't what he wanted? A combination of reading-between-the-lines and having opinions helps cut a way through the noise of user feedback.

Stirring the pot

Here are a few wishes for some free software projects that I want to see succeed further, but which really need to get opinionated to be effective. These projects aren't failing, but they're not reaching the potential I know is there.

Each of them are infrastructural in some way, and that's probably where the temptation to avoid being opinionated is strongest. But here's the genius: the rewards of being opinionated here are high. Ruby on Rails is the existence proof.

Beagle, live search technology for GNOME. Needs to decide where its primary use will be, and get on and hit the 1.0 point for that use only. Choose one or two neat applications for integration, and be so utterly cool that every other app author flocks to integrate too.
Synchronization. First MultiSync, then OpenSync, have rumbled on for ages, without ever being truly effective for any particular device. My take: choose a few "must-have" target devices--say, iPods and Nokia phones--and make them work completely. Nearly-but-not-quite pleases nobody.
Mono. Mono's great, but where's the story? There's loads of potential in the people and the ideas behind the project, but playing catchup with Microsoft isn't very inspiring. Early projects like Muine helped Mono's cachet here, but we need more. My personal favourite option would have been a completely free alternative to ASP.NET for web applications. (I've seen a project called MonoRail, but don't know if it's the one...)

What's better? A handful of users with the "right" idea about how fundamentally important you are to everything, or loads of users who only see a portion of the capabilities of a project?

Copy the experts

It may seem like cheating to copy Apple's lead, but a lot of what they've done in OS X is to take a stand on what's useful and not. On many occasions this has inconvenienced people, but it's not eroded that special lure that Apple products hold. There's not harm in asking "What have Apple done?" with some of our projects.

Another poster-child for being opinionated is Ubuntu Linux. Technically, it's only marginally better than other Linux distributions. Strategically, it's miles ahead. Its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, had very solid opinions about where Ubuntu should go, and pursued them. Over time, these have pervaded the product itself, but at the start it was the message and the style that made the difference.

Opinions not expressed are rarely effective.

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Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'software' articles

Telling stories with RSpec

RSpec Story Framework

Further reading

Launching Expectnation

What does it do?

Take a look

New release of XmlIndexer search server

Opinions and free software