In any given week our company is typically developing five projects at once, with teams of one to three. We run one-week sprints with a half day planning session on Monday morning, and a review session on Friday afternoon.
A sprint is the basic unit of development in Agile. Sprints tend to last between one week and one month and are a “timeboxed” development effort of a constant length.
Our sprint planning session is broken down as follows:
Product owner – prioritise and explain highest priority items in the product backlog (we use Pivotal Tracker). The team can ask questions at this point.
Product owner – set a sprint goal (what are we achieving this sprint).
Team – select Pivotal Tracker stories you can commit to, to attain that goal.
Team – demonstrate a solution to each story in the sprint and ensure no outstanding questions.
Our Friday afternoon review session:
Product Owner and Team - demo all completed stories.
Team – Review estimates from the sprint and note down how you went and how you can improve (if target not met).
Team – Review points missed from the sprint and why, and how you can improve on that for next sprint.
If you’re running sprints in your organisation do you do things a little differently? Drop us a line in the comments.
Our primary focus at The Frontier Group is web and mobile applications, but we do find time to design a website every now and again. We’ve added three websites recently completed to our case studies section of the site.
Earlier this year we began working on an internal e-commerce product that would appeal to our existing customer base, as well as new customers. While there are a myriad of options already available for businesses looking to move sales online, our experiences with them over the years has always been hit and miss.
Taking into consideration the needs of our customer base, we decided to integrate e-commerce facilities into our existing CMS platform. This has the immediate appeal that our customers do not need to learn yet a second content management platform. For new customers it’s great that they can now build a website with us and immediately sell online using our pre-built systems.
If you’re looking for a way to sell your products online, enquire about Madison Shop with your new website.
Why Choose Madison?
Take control of your entire website and online store with a simple content, product & sales management system.
Give your customers the shopping experience they need with a custom template created by our design team.
With support for most Australian (and international) banks as well as PayPal you can collect payments right away.
It’s an acceptance / integration test framework for Ruby that superseded Webrat and makes it easy to automatically interact with Web applications but at the user level. It’s now the de facto way to do request / integration / acceptance testing (seriously, it gets called any or all of these) in Rails 3.
Capybara supports using different ‘drivers’ to run the scenarios you specify and by default it’ll use Rack::Test or Selenium (which uses Firefox’s Gecko engine). capybara-webkit is a library by the guys at Thoughtbot that gives Capybara a WebKit-powered driver using the WebKit implementation in Qt, a popular cross-platform development toolkit.
Why?
Why get WebKit involved with your integration tests at all? Perhaps your userbase is primarily made up of Safari and Chrome users (both WebKit-powered browsers) and you want to focus on them. Or perhaps you’re thorough and want to ensure the JavaScript on your pages works fine with your tests in a WebKit scenario too.
Installation
Here’s the bad news. You need Qt installed in order to install capybara-webkit. If you’re on OS X, grab it from here (pick the Cocoa: Mac binary package – the 206MB version). You can install via homebrew too (using brew install qt), but Thoughtbot says it takes forever (well, almost).
Once you’ve installed the Qt toolkit, add this to your app’s Gemfile:
gem 'capybara-webkit'
Then run bundle and you’re off to the races.
Usage
Once everything’s installed, you can set Capybara’s JavaScript driver to use Webkit by default, by adding this to your normal Capybara config options (or if you have none, in spec/spec_helper.rb in most Rails 3 cases):
Capybara.javascript_driver = :webkit
Then, if you’re using Cucumber you can add the following tag to the header of your scenario to trigger JavaScript usage specifically (it’s not done by default):
@javascript
In regular RSpec code, you can do something like this:
feature "The signup page" do
scenario "should load", :js => true do
visit new_user_registration_path
page.should have_selector("form.user_new")
end
end
You could also use the :driver option to specify :webkit if you want to choose the driver on a per scenario / describe basis. The same applies to @webkit in Cucumber.
If you’re on OS X, when you first run tests using capybara-webkit the OS X firewall might go a little crazy since it works by connecting over a socket. Just approve it and you’re on your way.
You may also have issues if you’re using transaction fixtures. If so, read the “Transactional Fixtures” section of the Capybara README.