On Thursday evening I attended the Skills Matter event In The Brain of Gojko Adzic: Testing Web Applications with Selenium & Selenium Remote Control which was a great follow up to Kerry Buckley's Web Testing with Selenium talk he did at Barcamp Brighton last September.

Richard has been to a few Skills Matter Java & JEE events before and had thought them useful, so when I spotted the Selenium talk I thought I'd go along and see what I could gain from it. My previous experience with Selenium had involved the Selenium IDE for firefox and recording various scripts to be used as a very basic regression suite - intended to be ran after a new deployment to a live server to ensure that the deployment hadn't broken anything and that response times were acceptable. So, I felt my knowledge was pretty basic and that this event should broaden my appreciation of the various aspects of Selenium as a tool.

The evening was broken into 3 parts, presented by 3 people and in total lasting an hour and a half, from 6.30pm to around 8pm.

Part One was an introduction to Selenium by Gojko Adzic and introduced the concepts and associated tools. Gojko has put together a blog entry detailing all the links he mentioned, and also links to the other speakers. From this introduction I heard about a few tools I didn't know off:

• StoryTestIQ - a mashup of Selenium and FitNesse which sounds like it is more tester friendly but with the ability to script database access for setup and teardown tasks
• WebTest Fixtures - an extension to FitNesse that implement a customer-friendly language for web testing, utilising Selenium Remote Control

Part Two was Milan Bogdanovic, a tester from SQS-UK. This talk focussed on the Selenium IDE, which, as I mentioned above, is the only bit of Selenium I've every really played with and so I didn't gain as much from this part. I did, however, learn about the ability to use XPath expressions as the target and also got pointed at a useful Firefox extension XPath Checker to help work out the correct XPath expression for an element to check or select. I also found out about the ability to make use of the user-extensions.js file to store javascript functions and execute them via the IDE.

Part Three was Ivan Sanchez and was focussed on Selenium RC. As with Gojko he has put together a blog post of links based on his session. I knew very little about this, although I knew that Emily had made some good progress using it. There were quite a few hints and tips coming out of this session, many relating to the architecting of the tests:

• Ideally start a new browser for each test - this ensures a clean base, but does make the process slow
• Extract configuration details into an external properties file - otherwise, as with all other areas of development, your code ends up littered with "special" values
• Make use of the PageObjects design pattern which presents each page as an object comprised of the services that the page offers - thus decoupling the HTML elements from the functional elements
• Think carefully about when and how often these tests get run, as mentioned above they can be slow to execute so don't put them into a continuous integration environment to be run at each check-in, instead do them in batch overnight or a couple of times during the day
• Consider using the Selenium Grid option to perform the tests across multiple machines to reduce the time to execute - this can also work using Amazon's EC2 service

All in all a good evening, well worth attending and I'll be keeping an eye on future events being run by Skills Matter as part of the Open Source .NET series

Labels: event, london

// posted by Jane @ 9:07 AM   

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Hi,

I'm glad that you liked the event. If you filled in the card at the end, when the star was on the screen, you might be interested in the poll results (you'll probably be surprised) -- see how many points are there in a five point star?

# posted by  Gojko Adzic : 10:40 PM

 

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On Thursday myself and Dave (the Madgex DBA) headed off to the Microsoft offices in Victoria to attend the SQL Server User Group meeting which was the launch event for SQL Server 2008.

There were 2 key speakers (blurb taken from an email from SQL Server User Group):

• Jasper Smith did the first stint on Admin stuff. He’s been an MVP for quite a while and has until recently been working at Nationwide. His blog can be found here and his website here. He’s got some great utilities like server manager for vista and Reporting Services scripter.
• Simon Sabin did the last session on dev stuff. He is also an MVP and is a freelance consultant and works as part of SQL Know How and SQL Skills. His blog can be found here.

Bruce posted a link to the Dev Team earlier this week which covers a lot of the same ground, 10 reasons why SQL Server 2008 is going to rock, and so I'm going to use this as a starter and just supplement it with the additional areas covered.

• Database encryption – another enterprise only tool. You can now encrypt a database against a user defined key (stored as a certificate on the filing system). This will also result in tempdb being encrypted. When encrypted the mdf and ldf files are also encrypted, as are backups.
• Debugging has improved in the Management studio, can debug through a series of statements not just stored procedures.
• Using Inline variable assignment you can use a rowset to insert multiple data items in one line – Insert into values (1), (2), (3) – at the back end this gets translated into a union statement (see more here).
• Merge is introduced (finally) – see here for some posts about it. But the short version is the ability to do
  Merge Into
  Using
  When matched then
    Update set
  When target not matched then
    Insert
  Basically doing an insert and update in one statement. Merge is deterministic, and appears to be quicker but mileage may vary.
• CLR now handles larger data types (> 8000 bytes)

Another good evening, this time complete with pizza and beer.
Update: Simon has posted a follow-up containing the answers to questions he didn't get time to answer.

Labels: event, london, SQLServer

// posted by Jane @ 6:55 PM   

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Last night I went along to the SQL Server User Group meeting in Microsoft's London offices in Victoria (5 minutes walk from the station) to see what it was all about. The topics for the evening were:
• SQL Server 64 bit – advantages and choices
• Cursors – good or evil

The event was held at Microsoft London in one of the auditorium and was very professionally hosted.

It started at 6pm with an update on latest SQL Server related news – including the fact that SQL Server 2008 wouldn’t start on the 29th February 2008 - oops!

The next session was about SQL Server 64 bit, and when you should choose it – this was a bit too DBA focussed for me and was quite low level. But it was well presented and the presenter, Christian Bolton, obviously knew his stuff. His summary was that the question shouldn’t be "Why should I choose 64 bit?" but "Why wouldn’t I?".

There was then a break for pizza and drinks – no beer this time but apparently there normally is. I chatted to a few people and it would appear that LINQ has divided a community - with DBAs being suspicious of the load it was going to place on their databases without, necessarily, the ability to tune it as effectively as they feel they currently do. The developers liked the idea though.

The final session was about cursors and was presented by Eric Alsop – this talk’s summary was "Nothing divides the SQL community like a cursor, so why are they still around? In this session we are going to look at how to use cursors and when they are most applicable." This was an interesting talk, furnished with plenty of examples, to indicate at which points cursors will save you processing cost over using set based logic (mainly around aggregation, periodic optimisation (whatever that is) and matching issues.

All in all a good evening, and I'm planning to attend the one in June which is billed as a SQL Server 2008 UK Usergroup London Launch event. More details are available on the UK SQL Server Community website.

Update
I asked our Madgex DBA about his opinion on the 32 bit vs 64 bit question and his response was
"I think that the speaker was right to ask 'Why wouldn’t I?'. I think that the advantages for database applications far outweigh any additional cost. Considering that 64 bit is the future (or is that the present?), I think that rather than having to justify using a 64 bit system you would need to justify using a 32 bit system. Why would you want to use outdated technology? Obviously there is no point in upgrading to a 64 bit system just for the sake of it, but if your system has outgrown the capability of the current hardware and performance is suffering, or if the hardware has come to the end of it’s life and you were going to upgrade anyway, then I think that you would need a good reason not to upgrade to a 64 bit system.

The basic advantages are:

• Improved scalability through support of larger amounts of RAM and more processors.
• Improved performance through the ability to properly use all the available RAM (In a 32 bit system using AWE to increase the amount of memory, SQL only use the AWE memory for caching data pages. It cannot be used for other processes such as caching execution plans, sorting, hash tables, index creation etc.)

There is a good white paper that explains the issues."

Labels: event, london, SQLServer

// posted by Jane @ 10:02 AM   

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I've considered heading up to London for a girl geek dinner for quite a long time now, months before Rosie, Joh, Devi and Ribot brought the concept to Brighton. The trouble was always that working in Crowborough it was going to be a struggle to get into town in time. Of course I don't work in Crowborough any more, Hurrah!

After my last successful trip to Google, having a Girl Geek Dinner there was just too good an opportunity to miss, so Rosie and I headed off again.

The format was different to the Brighton ones, but as this was my first I have no idea whether this is "normal" or not. We arrived and were greated with glasses of wine (provided by Sara of San Lorenzo) and before very long dinner was served in the Google canteen. The desserts were excellent again!

After satisfying our hunger, we then had the talks and presentations. First up was Shivauna Raff talking about the future of search and what the next big innovation in search was likely to be (vertical apparently).

Next up were Li-Wei Lee and Danielle Drew from the Google Checkout mobile team. Of course, as with all good presentations, their demo failed. They spoke about the development and test process, and most importantly the lessons learnt. They mentioned some specific testing tools for mobile applications which I duly made notes about for Richard. Specifically mentioned were argogroup and mobilecomplete - which sounds like a great, if expensive, way to test a mobile app. Also mentioned was a firefox plugin but I have no idea which one - Helpful eh! It caused quite a reaction when Danielle (from QA) mentioned that they used donuts and beer to encourage others to help test the applications, and also when Li-Wei said that the average google development team is 2.2, and as they had 4 developers they were a fairly large team.

Overall a good evening, and I met some interesting people. I'm not sure I'd trek all over London to get to another one, but if it's within an easy walk of one of the mainline train stations served from Brighton then I might well pop along again.

Labels: event, Geek Dinner, london

// posted by Jane @ 7:57 PM   

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