My employer, Stelligent, is hiring Senior Agile Consultants to work with our growing team of experts. See the job description here.

When people ask me why I enjoy working for Stelligent, the answer is simple: no two days are the same. At Stelligent, our consultants are able to work in many diverse environments whether it be an industry, a customer or a technical platform. We’ve worked on Java and .NET projects and we’ve created solutions using Ruby and Groovy. We are on the cutting edge of technology because our customers demand it. We’ve worked with financial services firms, health care, and philanthropic organizations. It makes for an exciting and dynamic environment.

Further, you’ll work with some of the leading experts in the areas of Continuous Integration, Test-Driven Development and other Agile practices. Contact Stelligent today to learn more about our employment opportunities.

Agitar’s Jeffrey Fredrick and myself will be hosting a free webinar on how to implement a continuous integration and testing process. Jeffrey is a key factor in the success of CruiseControl and is one of the principle figures behind CITCON (the other, of course, being Paul Julius); consequently, I’m humbled to have this opportunity. If you’re curious about CI or developer testing, then make it a point to join us for this event.

The webinar will take place on November 14th at 9am PST and registration is required. See you there!

My employer, Stelligent, is hosting a roundtable discussion on TDD at our offices in Reston, Virginia called “TDD horror stories” on Tuesday, October 30th.

TDD, or Test-Driven Development, is a great companion topic to Continuous Integration as your integration is rarely useful without running a suite a automated developer tests.

It’s another wine (brought to you by Savoy-Lee wineries) and cheese party. Stelligent is also raffling off a an iPod shuffle

From TestEarly:

I often run into teams who attempted to jump skull first into TDD and eventually threw their bones up in frustration when either schedules became scary or they ran into scenarios too frightening to test. Are there areas where test-driven development gives you the spooks?

As you can see, it’ll be fun!

When: Tuesday, October 30th from 5:30 PM to 7 PM

Where: Stelligent’s haunted headquarters (map)

Who: Developers, Technical Leads, Architects, Project Managers, Testers…Anyone involved in software development

You must RSVP.

Steve Berczuk, Robert Cowhan, and Brad Appleton (Berczuk and Appleton are authors of the excellent book, Software Configuration Management Patterns) recently published an article called “Agile SCM is Testing” at CMCrossroads. In the article the authors clearly make the assertion that testing and SCM are not separate:

People care that their system works as expected, the functionality was added as desired and not removed accidentally. We want to ensure that the value of our configurations is increasing over time rather than decreasing! To verify these things you need to test the working application. In this sense you can’t fulfill the goals of SCM without testing.

Along with several other salient references, the authors point to our book on Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk. In particular, they reference our advice on quality and policy metrics (note, much of this is in the “Continuous Inspection” chapter) as enablers to a more effective development ecosystem.

In demonstrating the Use a CI Server practice from Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk , I show you how to create a full-featured CI system using CruiseControl, Ant and various testing, inspection and deployment tools such as Cargo, DbUnit, JUnit, JavaNCSS, Selenium, Simian, JDepend, Subversion, Cobertura and CheckStyle .

The demonstration includes a fully-functioning (albeit small) web application. You will be able to access the full source of build scripts, CruiseControl configuration scripts, Java and other configuration files so that you can configure this in your environment as well.

If you’re interested in the mechanics of installing and configuring a CI system, this is the video for you .

Practice 5 of the book (which is the fourth practice in chapter 2) is Write Automated Developer Tests. It’s a high-level practice that covers:

• Writing an automated test using an xUnit-based framework such as JUnit or NUnit
• Committing these tests to a version control repository
• Running these automated tests as part of an integration build with every checkin (using Continuous Integration)

This video example demonstrates using the JUnit test framework with Eclipse.

In Chapter 6, Andy covers practices for automated testing tools. He uses plenty of examples for the Java and .NET platforms. Below, is a list of developer testing tools for .NET:

• NUnit - unit testing tool for .NET
• NMock - Dynamic mock object library for .NET
• NUnitASP - tool for automatically testing ASP.NET web pages.
• NDbUnit - seed your database to assist in component testing
• Selenium - Web-based functional testing that is cross browser
• Watir - Web-based functional testing for Internet Explorer