Category Archives: Open Source

Interesting Reading, Open Source, Software Development

Tutorial: Git – The Incomplete Introduction

Software Testing is part of software development. So you need a form of revision control for your source aka test code, and documents. You also need it to be able to review code, compare the history of code… or maybe simply to help others to master it.

We recently started our migration from Subversion to Git. Not because we have been unsatisfied with SVN, mostly because we want to use what our customers use. Additionally we want to profit from the different functionality Git offers, such as local commits and cheap branching.

But Git is different and just changing the tool does not change anything, it might even turns things worse. Because you cannot run Git like SVN. Well, you can, but that still requires you to know the basics of Git to understand what it will do to your work and how a typical workflow looks like. The commands are different too.

So we created this tutorial to get used to Git, understand, and learn it.
Continue reading Tutorial: Git – The Incomplete Introduction →

Automation, Open Source, Software, Testing

XCMailr – An Open Source Test Mail Forwarder

As a software tester, an episode such as the one below must be more than familiar to you and, let’s be honest, it has the potential of making the top ten of the most annoying things in our daily work routine:

  • Pain in the neck: “Hey, I need more email addresses for testing, I just burnt all my own.”
  • You: “Well, just use a fake one.”
  • P: “Nah, I can’t, I need the activation emails.”
  • Y: “Well, then, there are good disposable mailers out there.”
  • P: “Very clever, but they aren’t protected by authentication and I signed an NDA for that project.”
  • Y: “Here, use this one.”
  • P: “But it wants to have a real email to sign me up and I don’t really feel like giving my real email away.”
  • Y: “$§5$!51z1hhsks!”

Granted, it’s a matter of course that committed testers have many email addresses but what’s the use of them when you’re always limited to a certain number, when you can’t quickly change them, or deactivate them when an email service got hold of them?
Continue reading XCMailr – An Open Source Test Mail Forwarder →

Interesting Reading, Open Source, Performance

Nice Reading: GitHub’s CSS Performance

GitHub CSS Performance, Title Slide

Another must read for the performance-aware programmer and tester. A nice slide deck about CSS performance issues at GitHub. Includes solutions as well.

A talk on some problems solved related to CSS Performance at GitHub. The talk was given at CSS Dev Conference in Honolulu, HI 2012. I recorded the presentation from my laptop and posted it here https://vimeo.com/54990931

Enjoy and keep in mind that performance matters.