ShriKant Vashishtha

Distributed Agile: Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) in Practice

ShriKant Vashishtha · September 20, 2011 · 2 Comments

In one of my posts (Agile Testing – Incremental Functional Test Approach) I discussed about the impedance mismatch between developers and tester in Agile team. The basic issue is – testers receive the user-stories at the end of sprint when you definitely won’t have sufficient time to test it. To resolve that problem, we came up with an idea of splitting the user-story in functional tasks so that at the end of each functional task, tester could test it. That way tester can test in incremental way rather than waiting endlessly for a Ready for Test user-story.

Moving a step further, how about getting away from breaking user-story into functional sub-tasks and just write acceptance tests at the beginning of sprint itself? Developers then have to make sure that they develop the code to satisfy those functional test cases. Here acceptance test cases are not written in English prose but in a DSL structured in English (understandable to anybody).

Distributed Agile : Bridging Communication Gap with Virtual “One Room”

ShriKant Vashishtha · September 18, 2011 · Leave a Comment

While working in distributed Agile, one of the repeated patterns is “2-dimensional (2D) communication”. Distributed communication generally happens with Skype video and Mikogo desktop sharing tools. Skype kind of video-chat solutions help in bringing distances closer as team members can look at body language of their distributed partners while talking. At the same time, distributed desktop-sharing tools (Mikogo, yuuguu, Skype screen share etc) enable distributed pair programming as developers from both sides can look and use their own machine. Sitting posture is much more comfortable than collocated pair-programming.

Initially communication mode works well but after a while (say after 2+ months) it becomes monotonous, technical in nature and less focused on soft-nuances of communication. People talk when they need to and only to fix technical issues. Human touch goes down as time elapses which is a usual phenomenon of distance communication. Discussions on personal life, things beyond project scope and fun talks cannot happen in an environment in which your sole purpose of talking most of the times is resolving a technical issue.

QuickTip : Grails 2 on Cygwin doesn’t work – Error opening zip file or JAR manifest missing

ShriKant Vashishtha · August 29, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Installing new version of Grails is easy. However it’s quite a pain to make it running on Cygwin. The problem is as follows:

Jdk 5 introduced “javaagent” as one of the JAVA_OPTS and it has been used in running Grails 2. Shell scripts convert $GRAILS_HOME in cygwin format for running grails. So for instance if $GRAILS_HOME is c:/grails, it becomes ‘/cygdrive/c’ in cygwin format. This makes

[bash]
AGENT_STRING=-"-javaagent:$GRAILS_HOME/lib/com.springsource.springloaded/springloaded-core/jars/springloaded-core-0.8.4.jar
[/bash]

to something like this:

[bash]
$ echo $AGENT_STRING
$ "-javaagent:/cygdrive/c/grails/lib/com.springsource.springloaded/springloaded-core/jars/springloaded-core-0.8.4.jar
[/bash]

which JRE doesn’t understand while executing ‘java’. It expects -javaagent value to be something like ‘c:/grails/lib/com.springsource.springloaded/springloaded-core/jars/springloaded-core-0.8.4.jar’.

To make it work, following changes need to be done in $GRAILS_HOME/bin/startGrails script:

Introduce a new variable something like GRAILS_HOME_FORWARD_SLASH before making any change to environment based $GRAILS_HOME.

[bash]
# For Cygwin, ensure paths are in UNIX format before anything is touched

GRAILS_HOME_FORWARD_SLASH=`echo $GRAILS_HOME|sed ‘s/[\]/\//g’`
[/bash]

Also change the way AGENT_STRING is defined as follows:

[bash]
AGENT_STRING="-javaagent:$GRAILS_HOME_FORWARD_SLASH/lib/com.springsource.springloaded/springloaded-core/jars/springloaded-core-0.8.4.jar -noverify -Dspringloaded=profile=grails"
[/bash]

This change lets you work with Grails 2 now on Cygwin

QuickTip: Tree on CygWin

ShriKant Vashishtha · August 27, 2011 · Leave a Comment

I like tree command on linux which provide you the snapshot of the directory structure and files in a tree view. Something like this:

As most of the times I use CygWin on Windows, I wanted to get ‘tree’ working here too. I could find the source of it at http://freshmeat.net/projects/tree/ which I compiled and installed based on the instructions mentioned.

Though it worked but I started getting problems because of non-ASCII characters used in the ‘tree’ output. For that I installed mintty. ‘mintty’ is even cooler to use on top of cygwin. At the same time I got ‘tree’ command working the way I wanted.

QuickTip: Changing Resolution on VirtualBox

ShriKant Vashishtha · August 10, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Recently I installed Ubuntu on VirtualBox. After installation, to my shock I could see only 800 x 600 and even lower screen resolutions. If you want to change the resolution the way you want, here is the tip:

When you open your Ubuntu session through VirtualBox, at first you see the following screenshot

Most of the times we ignore these popups. But right now it contains information which is necessary to fix the current issue. If you don’t see any menu called “Devices” in the main VM window after you are all done with opening the Ubuntu session, you need to use right-ctrl+C and you will see some “Devices” menu options in the main window.
Click on “Install Guest Addons” in the Devices menu which will mount a CD on Ubuntu available on Desktop.
Right click and run the CD which will install the necessary add-ons.
Restart the VM and you will see yet another resolution option “1024 x 768”

Cool so far. However it was still not sufficient to my taste considering we all have big monitors. To change the resolutions bigger than 1024 x 768, you need to do as follows. Please keep in mind following steps are dependent on above mentioned steps.

Keep VirtualBox binaries (for instance C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox on Windows XP) under PATH variable and use the following command to change the resolution yet again.
[bash]
$ VBoxManage controlvm <image-name-without-suffix> setvideomodehint <xres> <yres> <bpp>

Example:

$ VBoxManage controlvm Ubuntu setvideomodehint 1600 1200 24
[/bash]
Your screen resolution will change to 1600 x 1200 depending on the availability from monitor. You need to perform above step while VM is ON.