Chris McMahon's Blog

Some time ago, I built an "Enterprise" disk imaging system, the equivalent of Symantec's Ghost product, from Open Source components, hosted on FreeBSD. In the process I discovered the FreeBSD ports collection , an astoundingly huge set of applications managed as part of FreeBSD itself. I used a whole raft of stuff from the ports collection as test tools in an all-Windows environment, everything from collaboration (Twiki) to network analysis (ntop). I was doing a lot of install/smoke testing, and the Frisbee disk imaging system was an important part of that work. I published an interview with Mike Hibler, Frisbee's lead developer, in the March 2005 issue of Better Software magazine . I discussed the wider issues of hosting test tools on FreeBSD in a paper for the 2005 Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference , and now that paper has been adapted as a FreeBSD White Paper . Dru Lavigne, a noted FreeBSD evangelist and Open Source advocate not only helped me throu...

I have a new-ish laptop and I haven't bothered to install unixtools or cygwin on it. (I had a bad experience with Cygwin some time ago). I needed to grep around in the C# source code directory for stuff. Windows Search didn't do the Right Thing, and TextPad file search gave me memory errors. So I wrote a little script in Ruby to root around in the source code for stuff. Maybe it'll be useful for someone (sorry about the lack of indentation, that's left as an exercise for the reader) : require "find" Find.find("../interesting/directory") do |f| # Find.prune if f =~ /Design/ # Find.prune if f =~ /UnitTest/ if f =~ /cs/ x = File.open(f) while line = x.gets if line =~ /stuffImLookingFor/i puts f puts line end #if end #while end #if end #do

There was a recent thread on the agile-testing mail list about testing Web Services. I ended up having an interesting private conversation with the original poster, during which I said: I would immediately ask you "how are these services implemented?" Assume that your web services are implemented as pure XML-over-HTTP. I'm building a system-test framework in Ruby right now that understands how to talk to and how to listen to these XML-over-HTTP interfaces. I could just as well be using SOAP or REST, but in this case I don't have to. > > Any "Gotchas" I need to be aware of ? Special strategies / approaches / I think it boils down to two questions: the choice of tools, and the choice of approach. Almost any set of tools can work with either approach. Do you know Brian Marick's distinction between "business-facing" tests and "technology-facing" tests? The choice of approach I identified is to test with unit-like tests th...