Visca al Barça!

It is a tough job to play Barcelona these days. When a team has too many players worried about defending, how come can they think about attacking?

This is why, imho, Ferguson had to waste a player like Rooney defending too much and leaving the brat swinging from left to right unable to deal with the backs. Last night, Puyol was as good as Ronaldo attacking while Ronaldo was not even half the defender. 

2.5OOO...

Our visit to Vancouver is behind us. Beautiful architecture, beautiful outdoors. We didn't make it to the coast. Next trip.

For $2.50 (Canadian) one could ride a bus from downtown to the airport. In a reasonable amount of time (less than 1 hr.) For a 2.1+ million people, it is very good public transit. 

It was hard to see a traffic jam, at least between downtown and the airport.

Wonderful local breweries, parks, and coffee shops. We found a blackberry porter worth a pint or two.

Blues blue...

A long time Barcelona supporter but Chelsea's defensive effort deserved to be in the Champions League final.  Hiddink is an amazing defensive genius...

Opinions...

If anybody feels the need to make a change or needs a sensible idea, I suggest help reduce corruption in developing countries. 

It is hard to ask joe-six pack for help in the next disaster while Wall Street bankers deplete his 401K and corrupt local officials in the next ground zero resell his donations.

Logging off this thread. 

Two-stepping on empty:

American consumers are deleveraging, in other words spending less to reduce their high levels of debt. Their average wage is falling too. 

By most accounts businesses have a lot of excess capacity. Why would they need to invest/spend?

No other country's consumer seems to be ready to step in for american's spending. 

So it is hard to figure out from where the future cash flows for this stock market rally are coming.

On the other end of the spectrum, it is amazing to see how these anti-.... groups are still stuck in 1917. 

One person suggested to me looking at X Movement as a "new way". The first thing one sees in the movement's web-site is a picture of a banner that states: "Abolish Money".

Pol Pot and crew tried this brilliant idea 30-some years ago and starved to death millions of people.

No room for common-sense...or memory.

Sunset...

If it was easy for IBM to rule the java roost while Sun was weak, it is going to be a LOT tougher to continue that easy ride with Oracle calling the shots.

Why did IBM let the deal go south? After all these years and money to become the main java shop? It looks like a misstep.

In May, Vancouver way!

We decided to move the great travels few hours west to see how another NW feels like: ocean, snow, cool town. Not a bad destination, isn't it?

Adriatic Coast...

I have been told that it is a nice trip, specially from Pescara to Senigallia. It has been a stage of the Giro. It may be worth a try

Here is Johnny!!!!

The funny thing about international politics is that the biggest "critics" of the west, need the west/capitalism to succeed otherwise their standard of living or their regimes fail.

Their dependence on oil prices is big. They haven't figured out another way of creating wealth and rise standards of living on their own since the 19th century.

Some parts of capitalism need reworking but the modus-operandi of accusing "capitalism" and not proposing anything that is meaningful and viable is getting old.

P.S. I read more often Saramago than Grass.

Feature complete!!

Finally, the feature set that is to be included in DevRiot for .Net is complete and stable. Next in line comes the installer and the delivery logic.

We are considering delivering a double plug-in . The users will install a Visual Studio add-in that will download DevRiot's engine. This way fixes will delivered easily.

This beta will support only Desktop Framework and unit testing. GUI testing, since it depends more on the running device, will be delivered at a later time when support for Compact and Micro Frameworks is polished.

A demo video will follow soon.

Another glitchy update...

We have been dealing, for the last several days, with an annoying timing issue that messes up all the symbols  displayed in the UI.

Cause & Effect:

One would have to think there is a correlation: a tech giant profit falls, they download our whitepaper. 

It seems that our wp has a reputation.

The beta is coming along great. I have had to devote time to help family, but I fixed bugs and DevRiot, I hope, it is getting close to be as useful as the whitepaper.

Me too!!

There will be no public beta for DevRiot .Net. Just access to the people who kindly signed up to try it out.

So for those me-too with a laundry list of me-too features, stop poking around!

Meet the Press...

In what could be a series of fortunate events, I missed a plane on Jan 1st. So instead of flying, I was working when CIO Senior Editor was gathering opinions about another QA mess. The last one I knew of was from MySQL. This new one was from MS.

So I decided to chip in my two cents since not many people was supposed to be working, the published article is here.

Great Progress!!

The last couple of weeks have seen a lot of bug fixing, a more transparent GAC manipulation. Th engine is a lot more stable. It needs to be because it will also handle the GUI tests. Back to work...

ISB

I hope it is useful!!!

The octopuss

Recompiling load & stress tests is taking some bug-fixing effort. Working on it :-}

The Road to Badajoz...

This is going to be my last post from Galicia, hopefully not last ever. I will be in Denver by the end of the month. The rest of the family is already there.

Moving a household across the ocean is quite an undertaking, even with movers. I have worked on DevRiot some: fixed several bugs, on the .Net Compact side.

Sendoff surfing session with the crew tomorrow. Next posting will be from the Rockies.

To Shake!

The weekend was busy as any impending across-the-Atlantic move would demand but I managed to download Chrome (I have been using Firefox for years) and poked around the web.

I tried to run the technorati searches that we appear on but it didn't work. It may be a matter of sgining-in, the reading was interesting nevertheless.

Some of the posts were pro unit test other against, Agitar, Agile, etc.

A blogger explained that Agile is an incremental methodology where the developer decides what to work on next. A couple of them stated in other posts that a lot of their collegues just don't write unit-tests.

It is not surprising: as soon as the decision of what to work on is made by the over-pressured project manager, something's got to give.

Agitar's demise may be a consequence of the previous, but it also missed some crucial requirements: it just worked unit tests, the underlying framework was somewhat limited. It also solved just part of a customer problem: product quality. By only adding a lock statement the whole thing lost compass.

BTW, Chrome seems very useful...

Possibilities

In case any of you were wondering, DevRiot runs in Java and .Net but it is not limited to those runtimes. It could run on C or C++.

It is a matter of resources available:-}

Wise Guys...

Well the Spanish (mine too) PM managed to have his picture taken with the rest of the big boys.

But so did the Dutch PM.

Apparently the price paid by Spain for the picture was high according to the specialized press. The Dutch were invited. The meeting was with the lamest of the duck US presidents.

So after the Azores picture, Trafalgar, all the gold from the New World, Spain still willingly buys the Brooklyn Bridge.

Unbelievable...

Recompile The Move...

Ok it's hard to move across the ocean again and fix bugs but we have managed to fix some areas that were choking while recompiling: abstract classes + interfaces.

Still no departure date.

Moving to Denver this winter...

In an unusual turn of events, we are moving to the Rockies this Christmas.

Uninvited Guest...

Spain's PM is about to shoot himself in the foot: after crying and whining for weeks that he was not invited to the Financial Crisis Summit, it appears that France's PM is thinking about giving up his chair as EU president so Spain's PM could go.

Other EU members with stronger economies: Sweden (ABB, Volvo, Ericsson, Ikea) Holland (ING, ABN, Phillips, Shell) are out meeting. This was suposedly a European UNION.

Beware of what you ask for: Spain is not part of the G8 or G20, this PM has a history of diplomatic tantrums with the USA, Spain still is recipient of EU help. He has even made fun of fellow European PMs: France and Italy.

The first question would be: if Spain economy is so big , it maybe it doesn't need those moneys.

And now France's PM is willing to let him in. I wonder what price tag that chair has.

Unbelievable...

Open-Recession...

Recently, there was this thread on LinkedIn about an open-source project which lead me to think the following:

Everybody has benefited from OSS in one form or the other. Some others have contributed work.

But the interesting fact is that OSS was born during a period of abundance. How will it cope during global recession?

Do companies will have enough extra budget to continue support? Will individuals have the job security (in terms of income or available time) to contribute?

Hopefully, OSS will not suffer beyond repair for everyone's sake, but it will be an interesting development.

In-Out of the money...

Apparently Porsche acquired a huge chunk of VW in a well engineered derivatives operation that caught off-guard hedge funds worldwide, raising the capitalization of VW well beyond the total market cap of Ibex-35 (the leading stock index in Spain, this was according the local press)

The hedge funds are crying foul: this transaction puts in disrepute German markets. That is odd.The stock market has almost real-time, free information about any major exchange in the world.

What is clear is that if the hedge fund managers had information about Porsche bets, they would not have shorted VW. The derivatives market seems to be too asymmetric. It preys even on the predators.

Free Willy...

Has anyone heard about Canada lately? Not me. Apparently, they are happy, with a sound financial system, although a little bit cold. We have heard about everybody else.

So how come did Canada manage to avoid the storm and not Europe? After all Canada is a lot closer to USA than the EU is.

Some of its banks may be in trouble but given it is part of G8 and its economy is a lot larger than that of Iceland, there is barely any piece of news in all the financial and economics media about Canada.

Ahh, nothing can substitute good judgment.

Somebody in the...

Ah that LinkedIn jargon! I am getting closer to the point of really needing to use it.

But the real reason for posting is the *hope* that some reputed papers have that China's growth would keep the recession away.

How could China do that if it is relying on exports to countries in trouble to grow?

Someday China will be the economic superpower, but how quickly can China raise its per-capita income and draw goods from *somewhere else or even increase its fdi*? Not soon enough to help western bankers save face.

An article on the obvious, indeed.

The World According to Tarp...

It is amazing: to connect our Ipod to a brand new Imac we need to learn black magic (it is well documented on the net), to connect it to an XP laptop, it is a snap.

A well known open-source project just got kicked in the rear because of quality problems.

So, MS' QA/QC outspends everyone in the industry to follow XP with a stinker, it is easier to connect an Ipod to XP than to Imac, and the open-source project does not seem to fall too far behind these two.

And then some americans are wondering if USA lost the "financial" leadership of the world.

After two humongous bubbles in less than a decade apart, and over-leveraged consumers (whose spending accounts for 25% of global GDP) isn't that question superfluous?

Params, Threads, Generics This is another progress demo. It involves: dynamically allocating params, genereics, threads, and switching between classes. Everything is handled transparently and effortlessly to the user. With such a small learning curve, ease of use, and blasting speeds the testing "Total Costs of Ownership" should be extremely low while attaining effectiveness never seen before. Enjoy your Sunday morning...

Deleveraging...

It is peculiar that in these times of crisis, the spam industry changes from blue pills to credit relief.

Fortunately, we deleveraged during 2003/2005.

Back then it seemed pretty clear that White House's "policy goal" was to keep the consumer spending lost with outsourcing and the bursting of tech bubble by providing cheap credit and using dubious lending practices (I used to work for PriceWaterhouse auditing Banks)

If on top of that setup free market supporters start to play "shock-and-awe" with financial derivatives, the downside became pretty nasty.

Markets can only function with free flow of information. Financial derivatives markets are like a backroom full of smoke. No clear information, if any, about financial instruments with limitless downside.

So no mortgage, no credit card debt, just trying to make an honest buck with hard work :-}

Smooth...

After cleaning up some bugs, a task that is still going, here is another sampler: a 500 thread session, with generics included, ran twice under 3 minutes from scratch.

That is generics type, tests + threads creation, and run. Everything completely synchronized.

General Dynamic Fixtures

This is the first work-in-progress report in a while. It shows how DevRiot dynamically generates, stores, and retrieves tests between sessions.

The "fixtures" are handled dynamically. We can mix and match the generics parameter types on-the-fly, keeping the engineers effort easy, flexible, and quick. Extremely quick.

Very few tools on the market can offer such a low Cost of Ownership, in the short or long run :-}

Enjoy...

Delayed Amsterdam's Pix...

Well, Here are some pictures from our recent trip to Amsterdam. This is close to my syster's home in Jordaan.

This second one I am not sure which canal/gracht was but not far from Lindengracht.

Close to the retail area near Dam Square.

And this last one on our way to the Cleft.

Patently mine...

The question about the IP, there is only one owner of this puppy: me.

I hope this helps to clarify doubts.

Total Quality Slow Down:

It is always comforting to see that pretty reputable companies of all sizes get to efeKctive via searches like: "total quality management in software industry".

It makes easier the solo/self-funding effort. The summer months will be slower than previous months. Too many hours sitting in front of the keyboard take a toll on anyone's back, wrists, etc.

Hopefully, my new surfboard will be here by our arrival.

So tomorrow, we are heading to Amsterdam to visit my sister. Pictures will be coming...

Summer Blues Report...

I must admit that moving suites/tests from storage to binary form has been a challenge. It has become more difficult than DevRiot for Java because it has more features to take care of.

Generics Generation has posed its own set of binarization challenges.

But still snailing away...

Still working out the bugs...

...inside the generics engine to recompile the tests from storage. Not being able to ask questions makes the work slow down a lot.

Will have another demo soon.

The Referencer

Is still working on fixing bugs. The logic to implement new/old method matching is uncovering a lot of bugs. Not as close to beta as I thought or would like...

Plugging the plug-in

We are paying the error of working while sick on a key piece of code regeneration. Bad code, or at least worse than usual, that needs rewriting.

But it also has given us the opportunity of thinking about deployment.

We are toying with the idea of adopting "perpetual delivery" mode. Since the engine is not larger than 150K, downloading it can part of the add-in setup.

Generating Generics...

Stuck here. Trying to combine serialization/de-serialization of suites with generics and not generics is proving to have several traps...

Deploying the report,

Still making a lot of progress with suite recompilation and integrity.

Also some time has been spent on figuring out how to deploy the tool while minimizing the IP exposure.

There is VS Gallery and other channels. Obfuscation is a good deterrent but it needs help from other angles...

From the lonely tree to the red sound (Progress report)

The recompilation process is moving slowly but solidly. As anyone might have guessed bugs have been uncovered and are about to disappear...

Letter to My Sunday Readers:

I am still in the process of getting visual studio/sql server back in a workable condition. If I could find the misplaced XP cd I would rebuild the whole thing.

Watching a lot of movies though...

Chasing hotfixes!!

It is one of those days: VS does not want to continue working, not even with the hot fix. Reinstall time. It had been a long while since VS coughed up like this.

What else to do if not watching a movie on the mac while xp works?

The mac's codecs need updating.

Wonderful!!!

The S option seems to be a viable option!

Good ol' SQL improved the serialization of tests by leaps and bounds.

Now it takes less than minute and a half to create and store 5,000,000 tests. Before this much time was needed for 100,000.

The S Option

Given the enormous amount of tests can be generated with DevRiot, our old serialization architecture is proving not up-to-par.

SQL seems to be most logical way to handle this.

Well keep you posted. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Less than two minutes...

We have been tweaking around the serializer (getting rid of duplicate IO work) and writing, storing 100,000 tests takes less than 2 minutes. The development costs aren't why they used to be...

A more realistic approach to this feature can be: there is a method that takes a matrix and returns a modified version of it. Given the nature of matrices, a user could create a "base" test batch with a baseline matrix then modify the individual matrices with minimum effort.

Going academic!!!

It is always encouraging to see that not only businesses find the white paper useful. A lot of universities, institutes of technology from all over the world have been downloading the white paper (even for course work)

Even a national police from South America :-?

Well, the serialization server is moving forward nicely, although the weekend was lost with a clogged up laptop. It has been deleting *.tst file for the last 48 hours...

Storage...

I must have to say that developing code to serialize large number of objects can be quite time consuming.

My laptop seems to handle 100,000 or less files quite well. When the number jumps to 1,000,000, it becomes messy molasses to continue working.

Will keep you posted...

Beta Sign-up problems.

It has been brought to our attention that the beta registration page has been behaving erratically.

For those who have problems please send an email to the following address:

beta@efekctive.com

We apologize for any inconvenience.


This is an old post. Beta registration occurs at installation. Thanks!

Gluttony...

Being able to handle large number of tests (5,000,000 in my dev machine, but it could be higher) is that serialization of suites becomes a little bit harder.

Well, that is what I am working on now...

5,000,000

After tweaking some generation logic to economize the memory consumption, DevRiot reached the 5 million tests mark in less than 34 seconds.

Sounds fast, isn't it? Now, really going back to suite serialization...

I tripled THAT...

1,500,000 in less than ten seconds. Back to Suite serialization...

500,000 and counting...

The Suite serialization is slowly starting. I am polishing some performance features.

But I wanted share with the latest readers some of the brute-force finesse of the tool:

500,000 tests, no coding, no wasted time. Enjoy.

It does not register

Well after having a question/post mysteriously disappear from the VSX forum, which is a first, I decided not to wait more on that.

Two registry entries will allow the user to gauge according their HW configuration what the max number of user/threads DevRiot can handle and the emergency TTL (when all current users/threads are harvested to avoid hosing down the box)

To be a product that has a really small exposure, there a lot of big copycats :-}

Time To Change...

Well after fiddling around with the load/stress engine + 1,600 threads/users for a while, I think it makes more sense to let users set the TTL per test.

It is easier for the user to set it according to their knowledge of the code than use any predefined formula.

It also becomes part of the verification data of the test which should be useful.

Thread Quartet in K reverse...

The following demo shows a Load/Stress session on a object using four of its methods X 400 threads/users (1600 total).

In addition, there is the Assertion, Out-Of-Scope, etc, in a codeless, easy-to-use, low-skills-needed sort of way.

It is a little bit longer than the previous ones but worth watching (it has been edited to avoid the initial setup of the threadpool) :-}

1,500 Threads in action

Well , we wanted to try a higher number on our load/stress engine. So, we tried 1,500. Watch and enjoy the execution times after the initial run (when all the setup occurs).

58 Seconds...

That is how long it takes to create, launch, execute, synchronize, and verify a load/stress session with DevRiot. Check it out for yourself...

Why wouldn't you want that level of efficiency in your SDLC? :-}

Visual Threading!!

This is another progress demo with assertions, out-of-scope verifications, multiple threads were involved in a series of tests. Not a single line of code was written.

Try to achieve the same with other technology: Microsoft's, etc. See how much time it takes you to achieve the same. Then check how much more time it takes to get the results back.

How do you want to spend your time and budget? :-}

VUT Threads...

This is almost identical to the previous demo but with the difference that the Load/Stress testing engine is hooked up.

Note that the video follows the same script as the previous one, so no PrivateObject API or coding or scripting. Even the thread creation, execution, and harvest.

The other difference is that we intentionally tried to add a test without pre-compiling a parameter so the tool could complain :-] Three threads are created and used against the method under test.

The Power of VUT

The Visual Unit Testing concept in action: dynamic access to any member, array definition and manipulation, asserts, load/stress testing, and more at the-tip-of-the-mouse.

No more coding or scripting of any sort. Ease of use and blazing fast execution speeds.

Highlights of the of the video:

Field1 is a private array of ClassLib1.

ClassLib1 owns another private array of int. It also has a method that requires the int array to be initialized otherwise it would throw an NPE.

DevRiot allows the user to generate the code so the target type can be executed, notice that the NPE is avoided. Finally, the user asserts that Field1 is not null.

No CODE, No SCRIPT. Really. Check the execution times. Enjoy...

Almost Context Full...

The context manager is 60% done. 4 snapshots of the context manager at work: assertions, cleaning up, etc.

Automation?

We are currently working on the ContextMenu manager. It should be a breeze since the Generics support actually meant a major addition of functionality.

GUI support should come soon too, its major piece of functionality is ready to wire.

Which lead me to look at the Automation library that MS has on .Net 3.5-VS 2008. It is not a surprise , and not a particularly interesting competitor.

First is stuck in PC land. None of the major classes are supported by the Compact Framework.

Second, it is another hard to digest class/method behemoth.

I guess they are not competing on usability and product definition/differentiation...

Compare me if you can...

These two are a couple of progress snapshots from the Generics Engine.

To show the flexibility and ease-of-use of DevRiot's Visual Unit Testing(tm) technology here we have a generic method that takes 3 generic parameters. Each one of them is a bound generic type A made of an array of bound generic type B. Type B is made of an array int.

Just a few clicks away. No Source code...

That ugly description turns into an easy to use tree widget:

Short...

Now the generics engine can handle pretty much everything it is thrown at it.

The first ever Visual Unit Testing tools is coming your way...

General Complexity

The Generics Generator is pretty smooth now:

This is an snapshot of a that involves: generic method, out parameter, multidimensional arrays, out of scope data (PrivateObject in VS parlance).

And it is the same as if it a method that takes and returns an integer. The user just spends time on what it matters most: substance and not boiler plate noise.

None of the competitors can achieve such a level of usability and ease-of-use. Let alone the execution speeds. We are pretty close to wire up the GUI testing engine...

Generically speaking, visual unit testing(tm)...

This week has been somehow fruitful. The generics engine inside DevRiot is pretty stable now. There is an scenario where it is choking but we know where it is.

Here are another couple of snapshots. Enjoy...

GG:

Well, shortcuts do not always cut or are short. We need to frame a Generics Generator that makes the trick in the long run and not a longcut that comes to bit us later when it is hard to touch the innards

This is where we are now...

Anything VUT...

Visual Unit Testing, this is the acronym that best describes the visual nature of DevRiot's user experience. It also applies to the GUI testing engine but there are more salient features that describe DevRiot's GUI testing engine: device independence and ditching the capture-and-replay paradigm.

Back to ironing out some bad bugs in the generics generator logic...

Params Row...

The thingy handling the params modifier is pretty stable now. There is a scenario where it NPE's but I am about to fix it. It is a little bit convoluted because it involves also the dynamic-scoping of parameters.

Next will be databases (offering a clean way for the user to test databases). Collections/Data structures will be partially supported for the beta. The GUI testing engine work will begin soon, hello .Net Compact we are going your way!!

Back on line!!

It arrived! After several weeks of waiting the snail mail to deliver the laptop converter. It arrived.

It was kind of an experience trying to order the spare part from here having bought the laptop in USA.

It would have been great if the surf had been less chaotic but winter storms can be messy around here.

Anyway, it is time to get back on track with the .Net beta :-}

That is a new one Quincy!!

As any sensible person, I have a firewall running and up-to-date. And of course, the firewall logs all the activity. Obviously, most of the hacking attempts try to remain obscure and anonymous.

The attempts are from everywhere. But today there was the first ever attack that instead of leaving an ip address that is hard to trace, it left a url. An internet marketing firm to be more precise.

I do not know if they are trying to advertise this way or somebody took over one of their boxes. But it was funny to see such a thing...

.Nest My Private Arrays

Despite the hardware troubles we have been able to make some progress.

It is still a little bit unstable but we can dynamically define a series of nested arrays (arrays of arrays) of type A, and set the values of any private member.

And everything takes 3 clicks and 4 keystrokes. Try that with other solutions :-}

Stop!!

This is a not so good progress report. The development laptop batteries are not charding and the converter is not working :-}

I guess Dell will get another support call from around here.

Other than that, adding support for collections and modifying generics compilation is coming along well.

Time to wait...

Time Report...

Still working on how out/ref parameters are handled. We have been able to reduce the size of the execution engine by a good chunk. The goal was to make it small enough for the Compact Framework/J2ME.

But this means that the parameter processing needs some massaging. Out, ref, params can lead to some more spaghetti code than really needed.

Stuck here before fleshing out the widget handling logic (GUI testing engine)...

DevRiot for Eclipse NOT available

Since last saturday, we have seen several failed attempts to dowload the beta version of DevRiot for Eclipse. It is not available until further notice. I guess the links do not have the same note as the html page. We apologize even though is beyond our control.

We suggest waiting until the improvements and features developed in the .Net version spill over to the Java version. You can register for both here.

Thanks for your patience.

For Completeness' sake...

I just compared DevRiot for .Net against Nunit 2.4.3. DevRiot is 2,400+ times faster than Nunit.

And it includes GUI and Load/Stress testing, try to find those inside Visual Studio or Nunit :-}

The waves are just getting started. I'll try a two session day tomorrow :-}

The Fog of Fall...

Well after the dry and brown fall we have had so far (Galicia is like Seattle/Washington, rainy and green all year long) Some fog and rain has arrived last week, and with them some nice fall swells which I plan to take advantage.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I managed to compare DevRiot .Net with Visual Studio 2008 Tools.

The performance of DevRiot .Net is really good, given we do not have access to any of the internals: on the low end DevRiot .Net is between 800-900 times faster than Visual Studio tools.

The time it takes Visual Studio to process the first test, DevRiot is close to 1,000. But if we reach the 100,000 tests, DevRiot outperforms Visual Studio tools nearly twice that figure.

As any sensible management guy would tell you: why waste time writing code to get slower?

I will be working on the GUI testing engine, particularly support for the .Net Compact Framework.

And, I will try to catch some waves. Enjoy...

Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick II

Well, I just tried VS 2008 testing tools.

Ahh, what a way to get it wrong from marketing to development.

I will continue working on the GUI testing engine and device support for the Compact Framework. I will keep the performance figures for later...

Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick...

This has been a really productive week. I accomplished to run DevRiot for .Net under the new architecture for the first time.

Let's say I will hold off until early next week to announce the performance improvements...

Simple Update...

Well, just working in the guts of the engine now. Where the fireworks occur. No snapshots to show but really entertaining to fiddle with.

Still undecided of how to cache things for the compact framework devices but making great progress.

Mars Attacks!

This is one of those occasions when you feel afraid of the net, or feel like bread crumb on the fish tank.

In less than 5 minutes, my protection software caught 5 different attacks from different points in Spain. Buffer overruns, overflows, you name it.

I thinks it is time to disconnect :-}

May I Compare...

It is funny but blog-post.html from 05/07 seems to be pretty popular around the globe these days. I wonder why it is so special...

And it is interesting how readers compare the execution speeds of DevRiot .Net with DevRiot Java, specially since the Java data comes from a 1,000 tests run on Mac PowerBook (PPC) .

I have to admit that I have been redoing some code that looked good few weeks ago and now not so much...

Blue Molasses...

The EU "blue card" is coming.

Simply and politically correct put, it is a good thing but harmless. First, the skilled workers are not coming to Europe in numbers big enough to sustain the policy. Just two British universities are among the top 50 universities (in terms of research and innovation) as The Economist points out year in year out.

That means that to make the measure sustainable, Europe needs to poach those skilled workers from wherever they are (say USA, Australia, China, India) Tough job given the pay scale differences, economic growth differences, job market mobility, etc.

Back to .Net and Visual Studio...

So what was that about?

Again, it is too early to say who is going to be the better of the two (Alonso or Hamilton) but it still makes me wonder what was thought process going through McLaren-Mercedes.

Did they want to create just marketing hype for a year to place Hamilton on the tabloids?

Did they want to make Hamilton champion by bringing home the enemy (Alonso) to fine tune the car and try to control him through the team?

Well, Hamilton is on the tabloids for sure. But he lost the championship because of sheer inexperience.

McLaren is 100+ millions out the money, no championships, the FIA breathing on their necks, a two-time champion leaving the team, and a rookie who pressed the wrong button ruling the roost.

Go figure...

Context Adjustments...

Some times it is amazing where pointers to adjust features can come from.

And I have to say that MS seems to be on the ball supporting the extensibility community (not related to previous line)

Anyways, DevRiot's UI has changed a little bit to make things easier on inherited methods,fine tunning runs and having multiple instances of VS up.

We wanted to get this stable before get into the gui testing engine for .Net compact and device integration. It is going to be fun :-}

P.S. The second "Run Current Tests" really runs the whole suite.

Slow drip...

Sometimes things happen in a way that makes you wonder.

I have not worked on DevRiot's eclipse plug-in in ages. Obviously, I am concentrating on .Net since Visual Studio 2008 is going to be released soon.

But the funny thing is that the demo of DevRiot running the GUI testing engine on J2ME has become pretty popular this month.

How information flows in the business world is amazing!

Needless to say, it is going to be a lot easier to implement the GUI testing engine for .Net than for J2ME. Everyhting is already in the IDE (VS 200x) On the other hand getting the same device support on Eclipse/J2ME is like secretively impossible. Back to work...

Tell me what posts one is reading...

And I will tell you what one's marketing plan missed :-}

Well, Leopard came out. It may have solved some of the SWT/AWT problems that DevRiot was experiencing on OS X. I need to get back to it later. Some people got really upset that Java 6 is not included or better java support on OS X is demanded.

It is understandable but things should get less emotional.

After all, not long ago Apple was in the doldrums. It certainly came back but it is behind every big player in the Java world. And it is not going to let IBM or Sun have a piece of the Apple pie out of goodwill.

There are a lot more Java/IBM developers than OS X developers. That in itself is a major threat.

Well, I am going back to .Net and make sure DevRiot does not choke when several instances of Visual Studio are up and running...

Context it!!

We have done a little backtracking with regards of the original way we planned to handle assertions. Interfaces and abstract classes will be handled the same way: context strip.

Here is goes another snapshot of the work-in-progress:

What an eye sore!! (102,796)

Well, I finally managed to download all the components for Visual Studio 2008. It was long a process because of the size of the archives involved. Regardless, I have to say that the process was smooth.

Now to the substance, comparing DevRiot and the test tools of VS 2008.

I started with the basic: take an int and return it.

Nothing else fancier where DevRiot has advantage over VS: gui testing (on PC and devices, on and off screen), dynamic array/data structure manipulation, dynamic build test tress, built-in load and stress testing, etc :-}

It is an eye sore: test projects, test types, test attributes, test contexts, asserts, clicks, clacks to get to the point of to modify the test source to add the only thing that is of interest to the user: desired input and expected output. That is all a user needs. If the user needs to add a second test: repeat the process :-}

The thing is dog slow. It took (on average) 102,796 times more ticks than DevRiot. Granting that I was using Virtual PC but the times I am using for DevRiot are from 4 years ago on much slower machine than the current one I own.

If we assume a 50 times handicap (meaning that a 5000% improvement) DevRiot is still around 2000 times faster.

No wonder the execution time report is not the default one.

I tried to mess MS tool with changing return types, it choked like a child. Then I tried exceptions or even setting scenarios. It would have required getting into coding, api, etc..

I do not think they have clear concept of what automation means.

So, bottom line: why spend more time using MS QA infrastructure if it is not going to yield faster development cycles?

The pricing structure and road map discussion, I will leave for other post.

Slipping Cookie...

As I wait for Visual Studio 2008 to download/compare its QA features against DevRiot (it takes a bit to download everything) and work on the context menus of DevRiot, there was this funny piece of news:

Hamilton admitted that his car stalled because he pressed the reset button by mistake.

Go figure, which kind of strategic thinking went through Dennis' head. Back to work...

Crumbling Cookie...

Well, I did not want to say anything until the end. And even now is too early: it will only be known after Alonso and Hamilton retire to compare them.

But which kind of moron spends 30 million euros/year on luring the current world champ to his team, spends another 70 million euros on fines (25% of next year's budget) and bets the farm just on a rookie who already crumbled the previous race? and comes empty handed?

If MB does not fire Dennis, they should force him to be the PS2 or XBox team manager. Beyond belief.

Also, not counting the image/marketing damage (sponsors, any one?) Who would want to drive alongside Hamilton, after the current champ (2 years in a row) put the car in competing conditions is treated like a second class citizen?

Choosing Hamilton was a bet Dennis was entitled to make. But he should also eat the downside of it.

Sweet deal...

We just got a really good offer to participate in a major tech event next year. Obviously we were caught off guard (money and time wise) We will have to do some figuring out...

Progress in General:

Here we have a couple of the .Net tool working with generics:

It is funny how monitoring works. A big portion of the traffic drops, and then hits on the whitepapers and J2ME topics surge. And then a big portion of the traffic is back.

To open source or not to open source...

I was im'ing with a good friend from Austin, catching up after a few months off.

She was somewhere on the west coast on a business trip. She mentioned that I should open source the whole thing. She is working on SOA a lot lately. The whole thing is hard to test. So buddy, open source it!

I have toyed with the idea before, and yes SOA is hard to test. But then one looks into WPF and the ball-and-chain (to paraphrase Jobs) Microsoft is putting on these widgets just to make sure they are testable and one realizes that before testing SOA we would need to make sure that simplest things work.

BTW, I am been trying to figure out for several days why would anybody want to take that approach to no avail.

Roasted Chestnuts...

Fall arrived! Harvest time! One of the advantages of living close to one's farming uncle is that you get the goodies. This year are outstanding tomatoes, last year to-die-for wild "setas" (shiitake mushrooms)

Last night, roasted chestnuts picked from trail. And some pictures to share:

The neighborhood:

A day trip to Praia das Catedrais:

P.S. Why the overreaction? Some research units get caught reading DevRiot's feature plan and then tell the whole company to stop visiting the site? It should have touched a weak spot :-}

Beta FAQ 2:

For those research units interested in what is coming down the pipe:

*) The .Net beta will include Gui-Off: that is the ability of running the gui execution engine off the screen to increase throughput.

*) The Test Writing Engine will not be included in yet. We need field-proven execution engines before design on the writing engine continues.

*) The eclipse/java version will be overhauled after the .Net beta is available: it will become an Eclipse feaure, etc.