rant

Is Test Driven Development in Drupal possible?

Submitted by Jacob Singh
on April 8th, 2011 at 9:37:03 AM

I was searching for a way to make test writing for Media a little less painful.  I use TDD in Ruby, Python and even in PHP projects I did before coming to Drupal (5 years ago).  It pains me that I'm unable to find a way to do it in Drupal.  I read a fantastic writeup by a dedicated TDD engineer trying to switch to Drupal

"One minute per test case when I'm expecting to easily more than a hundred test cases feels insane."

I personally agree.  And I'm not going to spend a few hours setting up mysql on a RAM disk just to go from 3 minute runs to 1.5 minute runs.  The only answer is of course unit testable code which for any substantial module means a unit testable framework, which we really don't have.  

So if we're going to rely on functional tests, we can kiss TDD goodbye.  What is the long term solution here then?  Can we make D8 more pluggable so we can use mocks around cleaner interfaces to avoid this?  The issue is that Drupal's USP is you can mess with anything anywhere… as soon as you start introducing mocks, you kinda lose that which means the tests aren't as sound.

Maybe the answer is Simpletest 2 which allows you to run on a "dirty" environment.

Tags: 
drupal
rant
planet
tdd
qa

Why Americans are seen as arrogant: The Visa.

Submitted by Jacob Singh
on June 7th, 2010 at 5:24:30 AM

national_language.jpg

- http://xkcd.com/84/

Okay, now let's consider for a moment what America is.  Is America a "white" county? Although many would like it to be, it is not.  Non-hispanic whites were only 68% of the population in 2008 and that number is likely inflated since the percentage is dropping rapidly.  Is it an "English" country?  Officially yes, although a huge number of Americans speak other native languages.  16% of the population is of Hispanic or S. American origin and most of them speak Spanish or Portugese at least as a 2nd language.  So what is it?  An "American" country?

At what point does one become an American and then have the right to delineate the "other" and then humiliate them?

Has any US and EU citizens reading this ever tried to get a visa for another country?  I've gotten several and it is usually as simple as "send in the form with $50 and your passport and get a visa in a week or so".

My in-laws are trying to get a visa to come to the US and visit their daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter.  My father in-law was an important figure in the police service for many years and they are 100% above board legally and financially secure.  Here's the process:

  1. Pay ~$150 per
Tags: 
rant
visa
india
america

Appcelerator's Titanium: A truncated review

Submitted by Jacob Singh
on May 11th, 2010 at 5:25:58 AM

Like any self respecting entrepreneurial geek, I've got my eye on mobile applications.  Recently receiving my sweet sweet Nexus One (seriously, drool worthy phone), I wanted to see what I could break.

I used one of my very precious Sundays about a month ago to dig in.

What is Titanium 

As far as I can tell (this review is truncated) Titanium is basically an API and runtime which allows you to build a web application and deploy it to a mobile device, or run it on the desktop.  The differentiator is that while your app is just running in a webkit browser, you can add controls and utilize APIs on the host machine using Titanium's custom JavaScript APIs.  I guess they accomplish this via a plugin for webkit which renders them in the browser?  I don't know, but anyway, that's the gist.  It's supposed to be better than Phonegap (which is now my only other option for x-platform mobile development) because it uses these native controls instead of the ugly browser based ones.  So your app doesn't look like a web app (even though it kinda is).

The company's website has been nicely lacquered with Web 2.0 spray and they are venture backed.

Great idea, doesn't work.

Getting the desktop

Tags: 
mobile
support
titanium
open source
customer
rant

Velocity tracking in Agile

Submitted by Jacob Singh
on March 2nd, 2010 at 4:03:05 AM

Long comment from http://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2010/02/misuse-of-velocity-in-agile-projects.html has turned into a post here.

Scrum and Agile is something I'm particularly interested in and enthused about.  But it is strange how many people throw the terms around or even claim to work on Agile teams without a background in the reasons and common applications of Agile.  I'm not saying you have to do everything in your Agile book, but at least read one!

Some of these comments make my eyes bulge out a little bit.  I think even the most elementary book on scrum makes it really clear why we use story points and why they are the basis of all sprint planning.  

Now granted, this is *really* hard to use when you are responsible to a client and have to invoice weekly with the # of hours of work performed and estimate ahead of time what they will get for X.  Time and Materials or fixed bid, client's have expectations.  But outside of that, if you can get a client who is happy to use agile that basically means they hire X full-time people for N number of days - and hope to fullfil part of an agreed upon roadmap.

In that case, the point is that you will never have the

Tags: 
agile
scrum
rant

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