Avoiding the Temptation of Record and Playback Acceptance Tests
I’m sold hook, line and sinker on the value of automated testing. Unit tests, integration tests, acceptance tests – I love em all. I joined a new company a few months back (more on that in a later post) and I’ve had the opportunity to get back into some acceptance testing using Selenium/WebDriver. The allure…
Extending phpScheduleIt : Getting started with the API
One of the big features we introduced in 2.4 was a RESTful API for integrating with phpScheduleIt. This is disabled by default but can be flipped on just by changing the config setting $conf[‘settings’][‘api’][‘enabled’] to ‘true’. Once you do that, navigate to the auto-generated documentation page at http://your_phpscheduleit_root/Web/Services/index.php (if you’ve got mod_rewrite set up with…
Test Driven Development and Positive Reinforcement
I love writing code using test driven development. But this will not be a post about how to test drive your code. There are plenty of very good articles available and, of course, the Kent Beck book. I will reference the obligatory Wikipedia definition, though. Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies…
“Common” Sense?
I’m sitting around, waiting for my hellfire chili to finish cooking and I came across this gem written by Ron Jeffries. If you’re involved in any way with software development, this is a phenomenal read. His second paragraph starts off with this: Most of us were taught to write down all our requirements at the…
What’s up with phpScheduleIt 2.4?
It’s been nearly 5 months since the 2.3 release of phpScheduleIt and I’m sure some are wondering what’s going on. Well, a lot of time has been spent working with BrickHost in setting up a cloud-based hosting solution for phpScheduleIt. This will be a turn-key solution with full support for a great price. But development…
Extending phpScheduleIt – Writing a Pre-Reservation Plugin
My previous post walked through configuring and enabling plugins in phpScheduleIt. That’s great… but what if we need something custom to our environment? The most popular support requests I get are for changing different workflows – especially around the reservation process. Today I’m going to dive into how to write plugins for the pre reservation…
Extending phpScheduleIt: Understanding and Installing Plugins
One thing I really wanted to focus on when writing version 2 of phpScheduleIt was finding ways to keep the application open for extensibility. This led me to creating a pluggable framework that can be hooked into for certain operations. In this post I’ll explain a bit of the plugin structure and walk through how…
Flexibility and Configuration
I’ve run into numerous folks from both the business and technical sides of the world who want flexibility built into software. Developers and managers alike spew out statements like “We want to leave our options open”, “We’ll need to support that one day”, or my favorite “The business doesn’t know what they want”. As developers,…
Why phpScheduleIt?
Every so often I’ll be asked why I work on phpScheduleIt. I’m not profiting from the project and the time I spend developing, supporting and on general housekeeping adds up quickly. The short answer is that the time I spend is fun and rewarding. I’m a technologist at heart. I have been for many years….
Welcome!
It happened. I’ve finally jumped in to the world of blogging. My hope here is to teach, learn and have some fun. I’m planning on sticking to technical topics, but I make no guarantees. It’s safe to expect a heavy dose of Agile software development, PHP & .NET code, design and tools, and plenty of…