[LRUG] First product produced as part BBC Developer-In-Test trial

[Anthony Green]

Since I've been spamming the list with job ads for ruby 
Developers-in-Test I thought you'd like to see the first product to be 
go live under the programme:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2011/06/bbc_news_product_for_connected.html

It's the BBC Big Screen News app that's been being launched on the 
Samsung SmartTV.

The project is written almost entirely in JavaScript and was developed 
using Behaviour Driven Development approach with ~100% test coverage at 
multiple levels.

Cucumber was used in conjunction with a couple of specially written gems 
to run the acceptance criteria on the desktop and more importantly on 
the TV. QUnit with Sinon was used to write the JavaScript unit tests, 
again running in both environments.

Rack middleware was used to stub the behaviour of the various upstream 
services that were under-development at the same time as the application.

Rake was employed to build a suite of command line system tasks.

Ruby helped solve the problems of running our test suite on device, of 
testing asynchronous events, of speeding up our delivery process.
Ruby doesn't begin and end with Rails as two candidates I interviewed 
this month seemed to believe. Let's explore some of the other things it 
can help us do.


-- 
Anthony Green
Junior Developer in Test : BBC Future Media
Developer Evangelist : Developer Outreach Group