I am also using Cucumber, Webrat and Selenium for my integration tests.

I needed my integration tests to test the Ajax responses and the tests weren’t receiving a response from the Ajax requests.

The Problem

I found that by simply completing the web form, the ajax request was not being fired and my test was therefore failing when i checked for the existance of the Ajax response. It soon became clear that selenium doesn’t really interact with the form in the sense of selecting fields and entering values; It simply enters values. As such, the Ajax request was not firing and my test was failing.

The Solution

The solution is Selenium’s fireEvent method, which you can pass a form field id and the blur method:

selenium_session.fireEvent(”field”, “blur”);

In Webrat, this is ever simpler:

fire_event(”field”,”blur”)

On using this in a Cucumber step, the ajax is fired as the blur command tells the browser to take focus off the field.

Lovely!

Balsamiq is an excellent tool for rapidly creating purposefully low-fi wireframe mockups

Napkee enables you to import Balsamiq mockups and turn them into HTML prototypes! Lovely!

Axure is excellent for rapidly creating interactive prototypes.

Liferay Portal is a pretty awesome portlet container that, with a bit of UX (HTML, CSS and JSP) hacking, enables you to rapidly produce fully functional portals. It comes with a vast array of portlets out of the box, saving you a whole load of time.

JQueryUI is a lovely toolkit for quickly developing interactive prototypes. I’m not completely convinced by it as a production tool (heavy JS? but i could be wrong), but excellent for prototyping

To test it, i tried the ThinkBroadband speed tester, (that i successfully used to test USB tethering), but it failed to complete the test.

I then tried the Broadband speed tester site and got the above results, as well as a 74kbps upload speed.

When (if!) i find time, i’ll go digging and find out if there’s an obvious reason for this – it’s clearly shouldn’t be bottlenecked by the performance of BlueTooth, as it should run up to 3 Mbit/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth)

Lovely

Now to test the Bluetooth speeds

An important point to consider.

One warning – accessibility not out of the box

Liferay’s out of the box portlets are not accessible! It’s a known issue and Liferay want the community to support them in fixing this. Seems like a reasonable request and it’s lack of focus on accessibility stems most likely out it’s origins in USA. They care less than the brits about this stuff!

Tutorials

I’ll post tutorials as i progress through my Ruby portlet development and integration.

1. Download the o2_uk.ipcc carrier details file. Please note that this is the UK ipcc file. If you’re not on O2 in the UK, search google for your suitable ipcc file.
2. Connect iPhone to PC / Mac and select to restore with the option to select a custom restore package (hold down option on Mac before selecting restore)
3. Select the ipcc file as the restore package. The change of details on the phone takes only a few seconds and doesn’t require an iPhone reboot
4. Go into iPhone Settings app > General > Network > Internet Tethering and enable.
5. Connect iPhone to PC / Mac over USB or bluetooth
6. The PC / Mac will do the rest
7. Done!

Works great (i’m posting via tethering now)

I’m not giving up yet, but it’s not top on my list of ways to keep in touch.

However, if had twitter groups that enabled me to find people by topic rather than contact details (like i can do in facebook), then it’d be awesome. For now, i’ll continue using Facebook groups.

1. The project and client team write end-user functional requirements as User Stories and Scenarios
2. The stories are stored as plain text in SVN or GIT and made immediately available to the development and test teams
3. The development and test teams create a few executable padder files, wrapped around these stories, turning them into fully automatable browser tests
4. The executable files are run, they read the stories and interact with the browser to determine if the stories successfully pass

Pretty cool, huh! No more massive team specific documents, just good old plain textual stories that are shared by all on the project, including the client.

Making this happen across multiple technologies

• In Ruby, we’ve already used this parts of this approach on a live project using Cucumber (formally RSpec story runner). It worked pretty well. 
• In Java, easyb seems to be the a good forward. Here’s a little more about using easyb

I am WAY TOO EXCITED to see an implementation in Java! This opens massive opportunity to progress with a technology agnostic approach. Now to find a suitable solution for .Net and perhaps PHP