Refreshing
Refresh Cambridge held their first non-pub meeting last night. In an IT suite kindly provided by Anglia Ruskin University, we heard from speakers on Flash, CSS file management, automated testing and project management, plus my own improvised Pecha Kucha presentation.
Programme
Laurie Shepherd (WAR, Redefynd) spoke about Flash and the impact it can have on branding work when done well, and presented some examples from some of the leading agencies around the world, including work for Coca-Cola, AIWA, KangaROOS and others. With Flash penetration apparently higher than JavaScript (95% versus 90%), it’s a viable alternative for richly interactive interfaces – as long as you can meet accessibility concerns.
Next, Karl Dawson (That Standards Guy) talked us through the new CSS framework he has developed, based around the YUI CSS framework plus other bits and pieces from around the web. Due to CMS limitations, he uses one linked stylesheet to load in separate colour, font and layout styles, and a method I’d not seen before (”@import:” to load stylesheets only in IE) to replace conditional comments.
Sarah Stacey, also from WAR, gave an overview of the typical project management process for a new media/website project, from concept and workshop stages through scoping, documentation, wireframing, development, testing and launch. There was some discussion of whether clients were open to a more iterative, agile/extreme/’getting real’ style approach; in general it seems as if they are not – personally I think this is due to the commoditization of web design, with clients unwilling to trust agencies to experiment while they foot the bill, despite the potential for a better end-product.
I didn’t have time to prepare anything before the meeting, so I borrowed the Delicious Pecha-Kucha presentation generator built by Salted, and ran through my last twenty del.icio.us bookmarks to give an overview of the kind of things I’ve been looking at recently. It broke halfway through (get it fixed, Brindley!), but I think it went down fairly well.
Finally, Adrian McEwan (MCQN Ltd) gave a brief look at the open-source automated testing package Selenium, which he has been using during the development of his to-do list application, tedium. Although not really suited to large-scale testing, it looked like a great tool for setting up repetitive automated tests of web applications which you can then run through at the touch of button after any changes to the codebase. It runs in any browser, so checking that you haven’t accidentally broken IE or Safari is easy. Following on from app testing, Julian Price from inCharge.co.uk went through some of the tools and sites available for browser and platform testing (Browsercam, iCapture/ieCapture from Dan Vine and several others that I didn’t write down), and we discussed the benefit (or otherwise) of the various options. The site we couldn’t remember that allows groups to form and purchase a group Browsercam license is Fundable, and there is a sticky thread on Sitepoint where you can find other like-minded subscribers to join up with.
Summary
With around 20-25 people in attendance, the event was certainly a success, and hopefully we’ll be able to do it again in the new year. Thanks again to Tim at ARU for allowing us to use their premises and equipment.
If you are in the web development/design field in or around Cambridge, Refresh Cambridge is a great way to meet other local professionals, expand your knowledge and share your experience – join up today!
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Comments
- Jason Huggins
- 2008 days ago
Hi, found this post via technorati.com. I’m glad to see Selenium getting more use and visbility. Thanks for posting your notes and thanks to Adrian for doing the demo!
One nit to pick, though…. “Although not really suited to large-scale testing”...
How large are you thinking? We use Selenium to browser test on large-scale Java, .Net, Ruby, and Python apps at ThoughtWorks all the time. :-) Now if you mean “large-scale” in the sense of “can be used for massive load testing”, well, then, yeah, Selenium wasn’t designed for that. :-)
- #2
- Matthew Pennell
- 2008 days ago
Hi Jason – I come from a unit-testing background, and it just seemed to me that for true app testing (where you would want to be testing every single permutation of data entry format and user activity), the need to effectively enter each test scenario manually would not be workable.
- #3
- Jason Huggins
- 2008 days ago
Hi, Matthew,
With Selenium Remote Control, you can write xUnit tests that drive Selenium with a “real” language (like Java, .Net, Ruby, Python, Perl), and use anything at your disposal to test lots of permutations. Although, then you run into the problem that running acceptance tests (via Selenium or really, any GUI driver technology) is slow. So, it’s not practical to test every permuation at the GUI layer unless you have a massive server farm to run the tests in parallel and bring down the build times… (Hmm.. Amazon is rolling out a web service that could help in this regard. :-)
What I’ve found practical is to write several simple “happy-path” Selenium end-to-end tests. Those tests don’t test every permutation, but they lightly touch every page in the app at least once. And for testing all-kinds of crazy permuations, I’d probably push those down into unit or functional tests (1 or 2 steps below the GUI layer) for speed’s sake.
- #4
Sounds like you guys had a great meeting. Sorry I couldn’t make it, I will make sure I don’t miss the next one!
Adam