I just read an interesting article about Windows 7 - it will include a virtual machine to run windows XP for backwards compatibility.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132177

The article points out that this has the drawback of extra maintenance.

Oh cool :-)

I just noticed that selenium IDE has the option to export tests as PHP unit tests.

As well as following standards such as those laid down by www.w3.org I always try and test websites I develop across a range of browsers. Despite improvements in compatibility in recent years, browsers do still vary in implementation and even relatively minor browsers are still used by large numbers of people.

However all this testing can be hard to keep on top of and sometimes I just have to push out what seems like a small code change with only limited testing.

I’m aiming to automate as much testing as possible, this is a little more work up front - but makes re-running tests trivial and so more likely to happen.

I decided to upgrade  VirtualBox because the newer versions have much better support for networks that allow virtual computer to be visible on the real network.

But after upgrade I encountered the error

HostInterface’: The attribute ’name’ is required but missing.

It seems others have had similar issues

I recently finished work on a project that really suffered from a lack of build tools.

It was a large project, and while many of us were keen on writing tests we weren’t able to get management sign of to spend some time automating the test process. So even though we did some of the work we didn’t get all the benefits.

It was really frustrating to come back to a piece of work that was well covered by unit tests, only to find those tests broken

One of the trial of web development is ensuring that your site works across a range of browsers.

Standards compliance is an important part of this - but testing cannot be avoided.

I work on Ubuntu, and use VirtualBox together with a licensed copy of Windows XP to test in a Windows environment, which also allows me to at least test the Windows version of Safari.

For the last few months I’ve been working on a project that is part website and part data processing.

In theory the website is the bulk of the project, but in practice processing the data has taken a disproportionate amount of resources.

Data exchange with another organisation is always tricky - and in this case we have incoming data that doesn’t conform to specification, business rules that change, and a daily data import to run.

The code I’ve been working on has been through a couple of versions, and now I have in mind a third

Unit testing Drupal can be pretty challenging as it’s hard to isolate parts of the code.

SimpleTest is a great testing framework for PHP, with a Drupal module available too.

Many tests are based on assert statements, but this patterns doesn’t work for functions which are expected to throw Exceptions. As at the time of writing Drupal’s simpletest module doesn’t catch exceptions and so the whole test run stalls.

In that case the following patterns are often useful.

When developing a website it’s important to test it in as many different web browsers as possible.

If a client has a problem viewing the page there’s little point saying “but it works on my machine”

I have found that the differences between different versions of firefox to be small enough that testing in one version is sufficient.