I’m currently in Portland attending the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Visioning Workshop. What an amazing group of individuals we have here. Yesterday was day one of the workshop and we spent most of the time finding out the current state of the union when it comes to Functional testing and the tools in this space.

We started off with introductions. Then we had 5 mins lighting talks alternated with 10 mins demo of tools people have built. We had some really really nice demos and some really enlightening talks. The details will soon be up.

After this, we spent time putting up problems in this space under 3 categories:

• Solved Problems
• Partially Solved Problems
• Unsolved Problems

Post this exercise, we broke up into groups and talked about specific things people wanted to talk about using an open space format. All were really interesting topics, but unfortunately at a given time I can be in only one place.

Post this, I spent some time with Brian Marick, trying out the tool he has developed for expressing acceptance tests using pictures and workflows. His tool uses OmniGraffle and Rails to make this work. I was very impressed with the easy with which we could create really expressive acceptance tests. Since OmniGraffle is a paid tool and works only on Mac OS, we were trying to explore other options to creating these drawing. We had some ideas and we need to explore more on them.

The day concluded with dinner and drinks and discussions/arguments

I’m really looking forward to today’s session.

I was really privileged to spend a weekend with Jeff Patton in Pondicherry. I invited Jeff as the keynote speaker for the Agile Chennai 2007 conference. Jeff readily agreed to come down to India and speak at/support the conference. Initially we talked about him using his Pask award for the travel. Later we felt it would be better if we asked Agile Alliance to sponsor his trip under the Speaker Reimbursement program. Agile Alliance speaker reimbursement committee headed by Jutta Eckstein readily agreed to pay $1000 for Jeff’s travel. Jeff volunteered to pitch in the rest of the amount. Long story short, with the great support from Jeff and Agile Alliance, we were able to get Jeff to India. This was his second trip.

Jeff helped with the logistics planning on Wednesday. We finished the conference on Thursday and Friday and then we hired a cab [with a driver] and drove down to Pondicherry. Thanks to Sid for organizing the cab. We had 2 days to ourselves to talk about various things. I had a great time talking with Jeff. As always, I learned a million things [million posts to follow about them].

Jeff got an opportunity to see some new aspects of India [and about me] that he was not exposed to earlier. I think he enjoyed this shoestring budget travel and will have great stories to share with people.

At my previous client, we were using Lattu [Abbot] for testing RCP applications. While these tests worked fine on dev laptops, they seem to fail whenever they ran on Continuous Integration [CI] boxes as part of a CI loop. We were using Cruise Control [CC] as the CI server.

On looking into the issue we found several issues.
Firstly, we were running CC as a windows service. For some reason Windows services do not have access to the active screen [desktop] where the RCP application gets launched. Hence Lattu[Abbot] cannot access the RCP app. So we had to run CC in a console mode [start it from a command prompt].

Even though we ran CC in console mode [from a command prompt], we hit another issue. Our client had a very hard policy on screen servers on the server. If any server terminal was unlocked for more than 60 secs, a screen saver would immediately kick in. To get out of the screen saver, you had to enter the user name and password. Even though we hack the machine and remove this policy. There was a big brother program that puts it back.

One solution [work around] we found was, we would remote desktop into the machine from a old [useless] laptop and run CC from that remote desktop session. Then we would leave this remote desktop connection on and that would make sure the Screen saver does not kick in.

It had other issues that not everyone could see what is happening with CC from their machines. They had to go to this laptop and look at it. Accidentally people would kill this remote session and the whole CI loop would be down. Etc…