On this blog when we talk about developer testing we have an ongoing assumption that you're going to use continuous integration in both senses of the phrase: you're going to check-in frequently and you're going to have an automated system like CruiseControl running your tests.

But, perhaps surprisingly, many teams have as much trouble getting the automated system up and running as they do in writing the tests in the first place. The problem is their build. They have a system that is sufficient for assembling their software but that isn't ready for the demands of an agile team, demands like continuous integration, unit tests, functional testing, software metrics, etc.

If you have this problem then you should take a look at the Build Engineer Bootcamp that we have scheduled for Minneapolis in April to coordinate with CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference. These two events should pair very nicely: attend the bootcamp to learn the basics, then attend CITCON to delve into the state of the art.

Hope to see you there!

I've written up my account of how I spent my time at Elisabeth Hendrickson's Open Source Test Automation Tool Love In. My goal was to have a single script using Watir to drive both Safari and Firefox. With a bit more work I'd like to have the same script driving Celerity. I like the idea of a continuous integration setup where the Celerity tests run first for fast feedback and then the tests run in the browser to ensure compatibility.

2.8 is now available for download.

Along with a number of bug fixes and enhancements (release notes) there have been a number of significant below the surface changes that should be invisible out of the box but will be a GoodThing:

• Java 5 required to run: this allows us to update the code to more modern Java and to take advantage of the libraries that are part of Java 5 but not Java 1.5. (Of course you can still compile your projects with JDK 1.4.)
• Upgraded Jetty: along with the upgrade we are also exposing the Jetty configuration files to allow more extensions to the default behavior.
• Updated to Servlet API 2.5 and JSP API 2.1
• Specify Log4j config file: there is now a command-line switch (-log4jconfig) to specify the Log4j configuration file. Importantly, this can be either in the .properties format or the .xml format. The .xml format is more verbose (no surprise) but also allows more configuration options. From the Log4j tutorial:

"The properties file does not support some advanced configuration options like Filters, custom ErrorHandlers and a special type of appenders, i.e. AsyncAppender. ErrorHandlers defines how errors in log4j itself are handled, for example badly configured appenders. Filters are more interesting. From the available filters, I think that the level range filter is really missing for property files."

In addition to these change there quite a few little hygiene cleanups that made me happy.

CruiseControl 2.7.2 is available for download.

Lots of bug fixes, lots of changes to the Dashboard.

New plugins:

• Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks Store Source Control
• Git Source Control & Bootstrapper
• Http Publisher
• Mercurial Source Control & Bootstrapper
• SVNLabelIncrementer

See detailed release notes here.

CITCON Denver is just around the corner, April 4th and 5th. This the 3rd annual CITCON North America event, the previous years having been in Chicago (2006) and Dallas (2007). CITCON events have also been held in London (2006), Sydney (2007) and Brussels (2007).

For those who haven't heard about it CITCON is the Continuous Integration and Testing CONference, an open spaces (or "unconference") event that attracts an energetic and enthusiastic crowd of CIT practitioners from around the US, Europe and Asia. If you've never been to an open spaces event you can think of it as the best part of a normal conference -- the hallway conversation -- dialed up to 11!

You can read about past CITCONs on the wiki and then register today. But hurry, there are already 120 people registered and only 30 more registrations will be accepted!

If you can't make it to Denver then you might want to plan ahead by registering now for CITCON Melbourne in June or CITCON Amsterdam in October. Or maybe even all three!

I'm sitting here in SFO waiting for my flight to Tokyo. I'll be speaking this week at JaSST, the Japanese Symposium on Software Testing. This will be a bit different from my normal talks on CI because I'll be focusing on the benefits of CI for testing groups rather than my normal focus on developers. And there will be translation into Japanese which makes for a very different presentation experience. But I'm very excited about giving this talk because Continuous Integration is less well known in Japan than in Europe, Australia or the US, so it will be fun to be bringing the message to a new audience.

Configuring CruiseControl the CruiseControl way from ThoughtWorks Studios presents what should be a standard practice. Checking your cruisecontrol configurations into version control and having cruisecontrol bootstrap with them.

Now I could see it getting tricky if you have multiple build machines, but it seems like that would be pretty easy to handle as well by using different config files for different machines, or something similar. That might violate the DRY principle, so it would be good to think a little more about it. How do others deal with this?

I'm very excited that with two weeks remaining before the conference we've reached the 100 mark for registrations for CITCON Sydney. This is our fourth CITCON event but our first in Australia, so it is great to see so many people registered. We'll take up to 150 so if you're interested in attending, it's not too late to register. The conference will be July 27th and 28th, Friday night and then all day Saturday.

Btw, if you're not familiar with the Open Space conference format you might want to read this description. If you're still not sure if this format or event is for you, you might want to see what people have posted about past CITCONs on the web, or read the feedback from Dallas earlier this year.

The recent 2.7 release of CruiseControl sees CC join the modern age with a completely new web application called the dashboard. The dashboard provides an attractive web 2.0/ajax interface, a widget based extension system, and a bunch of new features like updating your CC configuration via the web. The old reporting application is still there -- meaning all the 3rd party tools still work -- so there is no reason not to update and check out the new features. Enjoy!

Reading Paul Duval's blog entry I found him making a comparison I use frequently: "CI provides you with a mirror of your software under development." His point is that if you find yourself getting mad at the build you might want to check yourself.

If you don't like what you see in the mirror, do you blame the mirror or do you start thinking about spending more time at the gym?

This Friday the 13th is the final day to register for CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference. CITCON Dallas/Ft. Worth will be held Friday April 27th and Saturday April 28th at the American Airlines Training and Conference Center which is right outside the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport in Texas.

CITCON is different from a standard conference in a couple of ways:

• It is free, but scheduled for a Friday night and Saturday. This means the people who attend are the people who are passionate enough about the topic to give up some of their personal time, rather than those people who are able to have their companies pay for it.
• It is an open spaces event. So rather than going from talk to talk and hoping to hear something of interest the attendees build the agenda, with each topic an interactive discussion.

If you've ever attended a conference and left feeling that the best part of the conference was the hallway conversation, then you should understand the appeal of the CITCON format. (At least this is the appeal for me!)

Past CITCON events (Chicago & London) had a fantastic mix of people, including CI and testing tool makers, very experienced authors and consultants, new and experienced Agile practitioners. CITCON Dallas promises more of the same.

Hope to see you there.

We are proud to announce that registration is now open for the next Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, CITCON Dallas on April 27th & 28th. Space is limited to the first 100 registrants and attendance is free. Registration is on-line and while it is open until April 13th we do expect to fill all the available slots, so sign-up soon to reserve your spot.

The conference will be following the same Open Spaces (or unconference) format as the 2006 CITCON in Chicago and London. These prior CITCON drew enthusiastic practitioners at all levels of experience, all looking to share what they knew and to learn what they could. We're looking for more of the same in Dallas.

Please help spread the word about CITCON and we look forward to seeing you there!

Paul Julius
Jeffrey Fredrick

Last week CruiseControl 2.6.1 was released. In this release there are several bug fixes but also an odd little plug-in that seeks to address a common problem with inter-project dependencies. Read on to learn about the new Veto plug-in and how it can help keep your projects building in the correct order.

CITCON London registration will be closing this week, it is just hard to know if we will hit the deadline of Friday September 22nd or the cap of 120 people first! At last count we have 85 people signed up and if history is a guide the remaining spots will go fast.

For those who aren't aware CITCON is the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, a free open spaces (or unconference) event on continuous integration and the testing that goes with it.

Given the open spaces format it is impossible to predict what the exact session topics will be but a sampling of the topics (and notes) from the CITCON Chicago event from earlier this year is available on the wiki. Also available are some photos, feedback, links to related blog entries and more... More than enough to be convinced that you should sign up today!

Greetings,

We are proud to announce that registration is now open for the next Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, CITCON London 2006 on October 6 & 7. Space is limited to the first 120 registrants and attendance is free. Registration is on-line.

The conference will be following the same Open Spaces (or unconference) format as the very successful Chicago edition back in April 2006. The Chicago CITCON drew an enthusiastic group of practitioners, all looking to share what they knew and to learn what they could.

We would appreciate your help in getting the word out. Please blog/post/email/chat about CITCON London 2006!

We hope to see as many of you there as can make it.

Sincerely,

Paul Julius
Jeffrey Fredrick
Chair-people, CITCON London 2006

I got fed up with updating the 20 step instructions on our wiki for configuring a new cruise control machine so I wrote a script and checked it in to CVS. Obvious really.

Despite releasing CruiseControl 2.5 little more than 2 months ago we are looking to get 2.6 out in July. The minor (2.6) vs. trival (2.5.1) version bump reflects some big changes:

• replace Xalan with Saxon. this should both increase the speed of the web application and reduce if not eliminate the dreaded OutOfMemoryErrors.
• use an Ant-style launcher instead of setting the classpath in the CC start script or in the manifest.

With these changes we know there will be issues to shake out so we're seeking alpha testers willing to have a go with the latest and greatest and give us feedback on the mailing list.

Are you up for it?

ps: As a side-effect of the switch to Saxon CC versions 2.6 and later will require JRE 1.4 or later (though you can still build projects under 1.3).

I'll be giving the talk twice tomorrow June 28th via WebEx (register here), and then again at the Better Software Conference on Thursday at 3 pm under the title The Power of Continuous Integration with Automated Unit Tests. Giving the talk in front of a live audience is a lot more fun because of the interaction with the other people, but I've been told we have over 100 people signed up for the WebEx already, so perhaps the QnA session will be a bit more lively than most.

Hi, I'm Karl Pauls and my team runs Agitator on a Bonsai / Tinderbox system. I'll be sharing the continuous test and continuous integration techniques that we use.

To get right to it, here is our basic Agitator / Tinderbox setup courtesy of our Product Manager, Nicole Pauls:

Aaron Rhodes has posted a good message detailing how to integrate test results from Agitator into the CruiseControl html email and the web reporting application on the Agitar forums over here. The directions detailed are of obvious interest to people using Agitator but perhaps less obviously can serve as an example for other people looking to add custom information to the CC feedback. Enjoy!

CruiseControl 2.5 has just been released and it has two huge bug fixes:

• Updated Xerces and Xalan jars to fix memory leak (CC-426)
• ProjectWrapper: Fix problem where forcing a build while build is running will effectively kill the worker thread leading to all projects queued but not building (CC-431). Patch by John Lewis.

Along with those bug fixes there are a few new plugins:

• ClearCaseBaselinePublisher: New publisher for use with ClearCase UCM (CC-414). Submitted by Kevin Lee.
• LDAPMapper: Email mapper that uses an LDAP lookup to determine user email addresses (CC-413). Submitted by Esa Laine.
• Maven2SnapshotDependency: New sourcecontrol (CC-438). Contributed by Dan Rollo with fixes by Jerome Lacoste.

So what are you waiting for? Go get it...

The main focus is fixtures but it also has some helpers for creating continuous integration scripts. This was all designed around subversion post-commit hooks and there is even a handler for you to run a SimpleXMLRPCServer.

If you're going to be at the Better Software Conference & Expo (and why wouldn't you?) and you want to be infected with the Continuous Integration meme then do stop by my talk titled The Power of Continuous Integration with Automated Unit Tests on Thursday June 29th.

Kathy Sierra's Clicker trained by our email blog entry just closed a synaptic loop for me. When I give my CI/CA talk I try and make the point that developers quickly become addicted to the positive feedback of that "build successful" email, that even this little reward, given quickly enough after the behaivor you want to encourage, is enough to reinforce the habit. When I spoke to Alistair Cockburn about this at the Jolt Awards he even used the phrase clicker training to describe it. But now reading Kathy's entry something new springs to mind -- in that same CI/CA talk I make the point that the real Return On Investment in developer testing comes when the test fails... and that's an intermittent reward!

So if you want to adopt developer testing as part of your standard practices make sure you're using Continuous Integration. In the beginning it is the "build successful" messages you'll be looking for, but for the long term you'll be hooked on those times the lamp goes red.