Scaffolds and structures

Posted on February 20th, 2009 by Sacha Chua

I often talk about leverage and scale: creating as much value as I can for as many people as I can. Now that I’ve been with IBM for a while, I see the personal benefits of that practice in the assignments I get and the help I offer my coworkers. In a way, I build scaffolds to help people to do more.

One of the ways I’ve contributed to my team is by integrating a regression-testing framework into our Drupal project.On the team call last Tuesday, the project manager asked if everyone had seen the e-mail he had sent about testing, and if anyone had any comments. I reported that I had built the features that were assigned to me, but I was waiting for someone else to confirm testing. He asked if we could look into automated regression tests, too. I laughed and said we’d had them for months. I had even integrated them into the build and deployment script I’d written, but the other developers said that running the whole regression suite of project-related tests took too much time, so I turned that off. Still, I regularly ran full regression tests on my system, using customized versions of Drush and Simpletest.

I enjoy doing things like that: completing my tasks ahead of schedule and using the rest of the time to think of ways to optimize how people work. =) Kaizen – relentless improvement!

More posts about: development, drupal, kaizen // 2 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/5788

http://testing.drupal.org Kieran Lal

Hi Sasha, glad to see you are using SimpleTests as part of your regression framework.

We use buildbot for regression testing at Acquia for the Acquia Drupal.

For Drupal core development we use a patch oriented regression framework. Read more about it, http://testing.drupal.org. We would love to have you review what we are doing and contribute to our efforts.

Cheers,
Kieran
http://www.alperkins.com Al Perkins

I’ve seen an effective use of this technique on an ERP project. We did a monthly leads meeting where we put up a matrix using RED, YELLOW and GREEN lights to indicate how we related to other groups inside the project. Mind you, this was done with all leads, including the customer leads (counterparts). It was a very effective practice to see how we were working as a wholistic structure.

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