UI testing - ugh. The mere mention of it can make hardened software veterans weep. As someone who's been developing GUI's since the 80's, I know all too well what a pain it can be to test them. And now that the industry is finally shifting away from its unfortunate digression into boring & clumsy page-based UI's back to exciting & seamless "fat client"-style interfaces using Flex, there is a whole new generation of developers and QA folks who will be experiencing the joys of trying to test every nuance of their whiz-bang RIA. Enter FlexMonkey 1.0, Gorilla Logic's new open source, automated record, playback & verification testing tool for Flex. With all the features you'd expect from an enterprise-class, commercial-quality testing tool, FlexMonkey enables you to immediately begin testing your browser and AIR-based Flex applications. And, like many of the best development tools available today, it's open source and free!
For more information on FlexMonkey: http://flexmonkey.gorillalogic.com/
For more information on Gorilla Logic's full line of Flex-related services: http://www.gorillalogic.com/what.development.services.flex.html
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Welcome to the first edition of Ruminations. Like my boss and close friend Stu Stern, I too am a creature from an earlier age (the 80’s). It was a simpler time, a happy time, where we young programmers (no one called us software engineers back then) cheerfully nestled in our darkened subterranean terminal rooms, feasting on Twinkies and Jolt Cola and clack-clack-clacking away on the 3.5” high keyboards of our workhorse VT100 terminals, blissfully without fear of the yet-to-be-discovered carpal tunnel syndrome.
Bathed in the comforting glow of the 24x80 character monochrome display, we thanked God every day that unlike our forefathers, we no longer had to tediously keypunch each line of our program onto a separate card and submit the completed deck to the mainframe trolls for overnight processing before seeing the fruits of our labor – a thick stack of fanfold dot-matrix printouts.
The sleek DEC VT100 terminal, c. 1978
As with the developers of today, we lived in a period of rapidly accelerating technological change. However, through the years our collective commission hasn't changed. We’re still responsible for the Promethean task of combining a complex, usually ill-defined and ever-growing set of functional requirements with a truckload of inert iron & silicon into a living, breathing, working system capable of delivering value to the business.
In this series, I’ll be sharing with you some of the core insights I’ve learned as an enterprise software developer, architect, manager and consultant. My intent is not to be preachy or pedantic, but rather to encourage (or at least amuse) those of you who may be new to the field. It is my firm belief, borne out of both my own experience and that of many of my current and former colleagues, that software development – even of enterprise software - can be one of the most creative, challenging, and downright fun professions on the planet. I hope you’ll allow me to share a little of that joy with you through these articles.
Bathed in the comforting glow of the 24x80 character monochrome display, we thanked God every day that unlike our forefathers, we no longer had to tediously keypunch each line of our program onto a separate card and submit the completed deck to the mainframe trolls for overnight processing before seeing the fruits of our labor – a thick stack of fanfold dot-matrix printouts.
The sleek DEC VT100 terminal, c. 1978As with the developers of today, we lived in a period of rapidly accelerating technological change. However, through the years our collective commission hasn't changed. We’re still responsible for the Promethean task of combining a complex, usually ill-defined and ever-growing set of functional requirements with a truckload of inert iron & silicon into a living, breathing, working system capable of delivering value to the business.
In this series, I’ll be sharing with you some of the core insights I’ve learned as an enterprise software developer, architect, manager and consultant. My intent is not to be preachy or pedantic, but rather to encourage (or at least amuse) those of you who may be new to the field. It is my firm belief, borne out of both my own experience and that of many of my current and former colleagues, that software development – even of enterprise software - can be one of the most creative, challenging, and downright fun professions on the planet. I hope you’ll allow me to share a little of that joy with you through these articles.
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