For any developer looking to test web services, there are a number of tools out there that seem to fit the bill. When you need one that allows you to interact and create functional and load tests with relative ease, soapUI is bound to be the tool you can’t live without.

To help get you started, Meera Subbarao has authored a how-to series on testing web services using soapUI. Published by JavaLobby and entitled, “Functional Web Services Testing Made Easy with SoapUI,” the series is broken up into three installments; with each article demonstrating an important soapUI feature that will make web services development easier for you.

Part 1 explores soapUI basics including how to write functional tests for your web services and how to add assertions to these tests. In short, soapUI emphasizes a good balance between simplicity and rich features and as Subbarao notes in Part 1,

Once soapUI has been downloaded and installed, you can have functional tests up and running in minutes.

For more elaborate programming tasks, Part 2 examines soapUI’s relationship with Groovy. Groovy is used in soapUI primarily for test setup, test teardown, and to decide which steps to start based on the results of the older ones. If you know Java, writing Groovy scripts with the UI will make your testing even easier.

soapUI also includes command-line utilities for running tests and mocks in a continuous integration environment so you’re able to run the test cases you’ve created within it and above all fail the build just like you would when any other unit test fails. Stayed tuned for the third and final part of this series which will cover integrating tests with your build tool, running these tests as part of your builds, and creating JUnit reports.

Wednesday, April 16th: 3:00pm – 4:00pm ET

Are you seeking to improve the development practices of your organization? Has your team adopted a continuous integration strategy? Are you looking for the best tool to manage your builds? If so, this webinar hosted by Paul Duvall, author of the Jolt award-winning book on Continuous Integration, needs to be penciled into your calendar.

Entitled, “Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk,” the webinar will tackle key topics and practices in the areas of continuous database integration, testing, inspection, deployment and feedback.

If you’re a lead engineer, architect, or development manager striving for greater confidence in your software product, you should tune in to find out more about how CI helps reduce key project risks such as late defect discovery, low-quality software, lack of visibility, and lack of deployable software. Additional topics on the discussion table include:

• How to use CI leveraging a combination of CI, build, test and inspection tools
• How to make integration a “non-event” on your software development projects
• How to reduce the amount of repetitive processes you perform when building your software
• Effective practices and techniques for using CI with your teams

Registration is required for this event and available at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/656993026?Portal=www.gotomeeting.com

On Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of attending the Jolt Awards ceremony where Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk was a finalist….and WON for best technical book!

Stelligent’s own, Paul Duvall, and co-author, Steve Matyas were on to hand to accept the trophy- which is essentially a giant can of Jolt cola encased in a Lucite block. You have to see it in person- the design is very cool (and it’s heavy!).

Many congratulations to Paul, Andy, and Steve; as well as the contributors, editors, and publishers who brought this book to life! This year’s winners will be featured in the June 2008 issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

There’s a lot to look forward to if you’re attending the SD West conference in Santa Clara next month. To kick it off, Stelligent’s own, Andrew Glover, will be delivering a half day tutorial introducing Groovy on Tuesday, March 4th. If learning Groovy quickly interests you this is one presentation you can’t miss out on!

On Tuesday evening, I encourage you to attend the “Agile Roundtable” hosted by Stelligent. If you haven’t participated in a Stelligent roundtable previously, this is the one you need to get yourself to. Topics on the discussion table include Test-Driven Development and Continuous Integration. For more information, or to RSVP, please contact mandy.owens@stelligent.com.

Finally, the winners of the industry-acclaimed Jolt Awards will be announced on Wednesday evening, March 5th. We’re quite partial to the “Technical Books” category where we hope Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk jolts the industry!

Are you a developer who always keeps an eye out for a better way? Do you look outside the mainstream to adopt the best practices of any development community, including Open Source, Agile, Java, and Ruby communities? If so, then you might be an ALT.NET practitioner!

The meeting next month will bring DC ALT.NET to Reston, Virginia and the Stelligent headquarters on Wednesday, February 20th @ 7PM. Fine food and beverages (think wine and beer) will be plentiful!

ALT.NET is about following your own beliefs about application design, and using the .NET platform to support your ideas, rather than retro-fitting your ideas to the platform. Topics for discussion can include the following as well as others:

• Model View Controller Pattern (ASP.NET MVC/MonoRail)
• Inversion of Control (IoC) containers and Dependency Injection
• Domain Driven Design
• TDD and BDD
• Continuous Integration
• Agile, Scrum, XP

If you haven’t signed up for our list, go ahead and do that here. If you’re already a member, I hope you can make it out to Reston next month!

If you’re local to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, you’re going to want to clear your calendar the evening of Thursday, February 21st to join Stelligent at their roundtable on test-driven development (TDD). The evening will feature complimentary hors d’oeuvres, drinks and a candid discussion on TDD fundamentals, why it’s more than just unit testing, and how to embrace it in your organization.

When: Thursday, February 21st from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Where: Windows on Minnesota (50th Floor of the IDS Center)

Whether you’re a TDD advocate (or working on a team that has yet to adopt the practice), everyone will come away with a better understanding of the advantages, as well as the challenges, based on experiences gained in real-world projects.

Space is limited so please RSVP no later than February 14th.

Does your organization actively practice test-driven development (TDD)? Chances are, the answer is no- at least based on the results of a survey distributed at Stelligent’s TDD roundtable, which found that the majority (84%) of the survey respondents aren’t practicing TDD, and 79% said they do not measure code coverage for development projects.

Interested in gaining insight on the findings, Colleen Frye of SearchSoftwareQuality.com wrote a great article, “Barriers remain for test-driven development” asking several of the roundtable attendees why TDD wasn’t being practiced and what it would take to get organizations to do it.

When asked to elaborate on why the adoption is still slow going, Bobby Pantall, Lead Technology Consultant at CC Pace Systems Inc., remarked:

Organizations haven’t been sufficiently informed of the business benefits of TDD. In our experience, there is a popular misconception that it’s wasteful to spend so much time writing tests instead of pure functionality.

Luke Majewski, Director of Application Architecture at Intalgent, added:

The common thread when we have this discussion with other developers is their companies don’t do it because it doesn’t make sense financially. It isn’t until you complete a project fully, with good test coverage, that you really appreciate what it does.

What are your thoughts? Is your organization practicing TDD? If not, why?

On the IBM developerWorks site, there’s a new tutorial demonstrating how to set up a Continuous Integration process. Authored by Andrew Glover, “Spot defects early with Continuous Integration” lays out a complete step-by-step guide to creating a best-of-breed CI environment using Hudson, Ant and Subversion. The resulting build process will run both tests and software inspections and will report back violations almost as quickly as they occur.

Thanks to the tutorial you’ll soon discover that Hudson is very easy to setup and get going. What’s more, even though the tutorial assumes Ant and Subversion as the build tool and repository, you’ll see that you can easily plug in Gant or Maven, CVS or ClearCase, etc.

For more articles addressing best practices for ensuring your code is the best it can be, check out the acclaimed “In pursuit of code quality” series or the accompanying discussion forum for assistance with code metrics, test frameworks, and the creation of quality-focused code.

Over the course of a few years a number of build automation tools have surfaced. One tool that is widely accepted as a standard in the Java community is Ant, a cross-platform build tool that uses an XML file format.

Ant’s attractiveness stems from its ease-of-use and ability to be seamlessly extended with custom capabilities. Plenty of people know how to use Ant and there is a broad ecosystem of tools and support around it. On the other hand, given the nature of the XML syntax, Ant is occasionally limited when it comes to expressiveness. As a result, build tools based on an existing scripting language have entered the scene.

One such tool, Raven, a build platform built on top of Ruby, leverages the power of a full-featured programming language with the simplicity of a build-centric Domain Specific Language. Paul Duvall describes this in the latest installment of his “Automation for the people” series,

“In particular, Raven enables dependency-based tasking with a full-featured imperative programming language (rather than a declarative one like XML).”

In addition to expanding on the benefits of Raven including demonstrating two approaches to getting Raven installed and configured, his article, “Build Java projects with Raven” also illustrates the relationship between Raven and Rake. If you’re looking for a tool that enables you to utilize the power and flexibility of the Ruby language within a build script, check out the article first, then check out Raven.

Learn about the other installments of “Automation for the people”, a series of articles dedicated to exploring the practical uses of automating software development processes and teaching you when and how to apply automation successfully.

CI experts, Jeffrey Fredrick and Andrew Glover will be hosting a free webinar on how to implement continuous integration and testing this Wednesday, November 14th- 12:00 pm (EST) / 9:00 am (PST).

Fredrick is the lead committer for CruiseControl, the defacto standard CI tool, while Glover most recently co-authored the book Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk.

These guys obviously know their stuff. If you’re interested in learning more about CI and how you can start taking advantage of it today, please register now!