Walking the Talk

At work, I am the champion of many technologies which further software quality, including:

• Continuous integration (Hudson)
• Version control (Subversion)
  
• Test Driven Development
• Unit testing (JUnit)
• Defect tracking (JIRA)
• Light documentation via a wiki (Confluence)
  
• Coverage analysis (Cobertura)
• Profiling (YourKit)
  
• Automated builds/testing (Ant)
  

Recently I started playing around writing a newsgroup reader in Ruby. So I immediately started using all these tools, right? Wrong. I just started hacking away. I was able to establish a proof of concept pretty quickly and learn about some of the gotchas. But after being at this a while, I started feeling lost. I'd forget how something worked and have to rediscover something I'd figured out previously. I'd have ideas for things that I wanted to do, but no place to write them down and think about priorities. Perhaps it was time for me to start walking my talk.

At home I have several constraints I don't have at work. I am writing in Ruby, not Java. I am not willing to pay the money for commercial tools (JIRA, Confluence, YourKit). I think Ant is a silly way to do builds and automated tests. So I started thinking about what my own tool set might look like.

Continuous integration: Hudson. I have written about this before, but it is a fantastic continuous integration tool. Kohsuke Kawaguchi is constantly improving it, so it is just getting better and better.

Version control: Subversion. I see no reason to switch here either. Version control with only one developer is dead-simple anyway, but why bother learning something new when Subversion works so well?

Unit testing: Test::Unit. It ships with Ruby and is the spiritual equivalent to JUnit. ZenTest also looks very interesting - promising to go far beyond the simple XUnit frameworks. I'll take a look at this as well.

Defect tracking: Trac. There are endless open source defect trackers out there. Maybe some are better than Trac. But I like that it is light weight, has an integrated wiki and has bazillions of plugins, including Hudson integration. It is also written in Python, my previous favorite language before Ruby.

Wiki: Trac. See Defect Tracking above.

Coverage Analysis: rcov. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only game in town. The outputs look very similar to Cobertura. I haven't played with this yet, but it is on my short list.

Profiling: ruby-prof. This seems to be the clear winner over Profile. I could not find a single reference comparing the two that didn't favor ruby-prof.

Automated builds/testing: Rake. There are quite a few Ruby-based build tools available. Since I am planning to use Rails in my implentation, Rake seems like the obvious choice.

That is the plan. I'll see how it all works out and report back on my progress. Even if it is a big failure, I will have taken a sip (gulp?) of my own medicine.