This is the first major conference we have put on and it is a learning curve for all of us. We’ve had quite a lot of feedback on the fees that Eventbrite charge us for using their system and credit card processing, with a common comparison to Ryanair!

We had originally split these out from the main costs to try and be transparent over the true costs of the conference, and to keep it in line with similar conferences in the States. So the website said £150 + VAT, where in reality it was £150 + VAT + Booking fee … in retrospect, not a great move.

So we have made a modification to the price which means that the full price, including booking fee, is now £160 + VAT. We have to take a little bit of a hit on this, but this feels like the right thing to do. Thankfully, it seems, this mistake hasn’t impacted ticket sales which are surpassing our expectations for our first week.

Thanks all for the feedback and see you in February.

The beauty of BDD is that it’s written in plain everyday language, and this can be directly translated to code snippets. Therefore the client is happy working “in plain english”, and the developer can crack on with writing the actual code to test these parts.

We’ve chosen to use Symfony2 for the project (more on that in a separate post) and for the BDD aspect we’ve gone with Behat (coupled with Mink); both of which have bundles available for Symfony2. Essentially, BDD boils down to Features, consisting of a number of Scenarios, which in turn consist of a number of Steps. Here’s an example:

Feature: Login to the admin area
	As an administrator
	I want to be able to log into an admin area
	So I can administer MyApp

	Scenario: Joe Bloggs logs into the admin area
	  Given I visit the admin area
	  When I am shown the login form
	  And I click login with my correct credentials
	  Then I should be on /admin/home

This could translate to code such as the following:

$steps->Given('/^I visit the admin area$/', function($world) {
 
    $world->getSession()->visit($world->getPathTo("/admin"));
});
 
$steps->When('/^I am shown the login form$/', function($world) {
 
    $doc = $world->getSession()->getPage();
 
    assertTrue($doc->hasField("_username"));
    assertTrue($doc->hasField("_password"));
});
 
$steps->And('/^I click login with my correct credentials$/', function($world) {
 
    $doc = $world->getSession()->getPage();
 
    $doc->fillField("_username", "joe");
    $doc->fillField("_password", "bloggs");
    $doc->clickButton("Log in");
});
 
$steps->Then('/^(?:|I )should be on (?P<page>.+)$/', function($world, $page) {
 
    assertEquals(
        parse_url($world->getPathTo($page), PHP_URL_PATH),
        parse_url($world->getSession()->getCurrentUrl(), PHP_URL_PATH)
    );
});

The beauty of Behat is that the step definitions are reusable, meaning that if you stick to a standard way of describing your steps, the amount of code you need to write is vastly reduced, compared with normal functional TDD. Steps that aren’t implemented yet are given default code as per:

$steps->Given('/^I visit the admin area$/', function($world) {
    throw new \Behat\Behat\Exception\PendingException();
});

which will translate into the output shown as a step needing to be implemented. Behat also takes note of the Pending exception being thrown and automatically skips any steps following this in the scenario, notifying you of this at the end of the test run.

Behat also comes with a number of standard step definitions built-in, although these are somewhat buried in the code and not in the docs :-( So for example the following steps are part of the included ones:

I go to /my/url:
 
$steps->When('/^(?:|I )go to (?P<page>.+)$/', function($world, $page) {
    $world->getSession()->visit($world->getPathTo($page));
});

and

I fill in "username" with "foo":
 
$steps->When('/^(?:|I )fill in "(?P<field>[^"]*)" with "(?P<value>[^"]*)"$/', function($world, $field, $value) {
    $world->getSession()->getPage()->fillField($field, $value);
});

which translates as even less code to write. Bonus!

Tips ‘n’ tricks

The Mink (browser emulator abstraction layer) setup comes with a Symfony2 driver which is great for just testing normal usage. In our project however we’re integrating Facebook authentication using the FOS FacebookBundle, and we needed a way to test that the user was being bounced to Facebook in order to log in. The solution for this was simple – switch to using Goutte as the driver, as per the BehatBundle docs, and voila, you can test the current URL contains eg facebook.com or whatever. The actual testing of the authentication itself I’ll write up in a separate blog post as it’s a bit epic for here.

The documentation mentions using a separate front controller for testing, with a separate environment configuration. This is definitely recommended, particularly if you’re using Goutte. If you need services to be available, for example your entity manager, pop something like this in your env.php file:

$kernel = new AppKernel('test', true);
$kernel->loadClassCache();
$service = $kernel->getContainer()->get("your.service.here");

You can also use the env.php file for setting up fixtures that need to be reset for each Scenario that you create, eg pre-defined user states and so on.

Caveats

Unless you’re using Sahi, you obviously can’t test things such as Javascript popups effectively. I’m in two minds as to whether this should be handled by a new type of Exception which can be thrown e.g. a TestInRealBrowserException(). That way it could be caught and notified to the user running the tests, or flagged as part of an automated build process for manual testing.

Overall, getting into BDD has been a fun and rewarding experience. At times the lack of docs make it somewhat frustrating, but this is easily solved by a) digging into the code and b) probably me getting off my ass and submitting some docs back. The ease of which the steps can be written though is a massive time saver when writing your tests, coupled with the reusability of the code. Big thumbs-up from me!

This was an experiment that we had decided to undertake after a “what if…” conversation in the pub between myself and Robbie Greatrex of Nonsense.  We had no idea what would happen, but were confident that if we put our team of high calibre people in a room together for 24 hours, something impressive would be sure to emerge on the other side.

The day was documented on www.24hour-startup.com with a live video stream playing constantly on the home page.  Visitors to the site saw us gather around, debate ideas, vote for our favourites, plan our development, create a brand, conceive a marketing strategy, eat pizza and cake, pull our hair out, high five, and in the case of Ben, Creative Director of Hutchhouse, sleep.

News spread quickly on Twitter with so many people talking about our venture, the term “24hourstartup” was one of the most popular words being tweeted about in the UK.

One of many technical meetings

The idea that we settled on (2 hours into the 24) was a website that allowed customers to search for products based on a colour.  The site would take product feeds from affiliate schemes and analyse the text and images to extract colour data for each project to allow them to be searched by colour.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was the image analysis to determine colours.  It was with only a few hours to go, and after about 20 hours of non-stop work by Rich, that we finally got this working and plugged into our test site.

Finally, after 24 hours of hard work and collaboration, at 11:59 on 27th of November 2009, we switched on our finished site, DrHue.com (do you see what we’ve done there?!) for the World to see, while we left to celebrate in the pub.

I’m incredibly proud of what me managed to come up with in such a short time : a fully functional and viable business, brilliant in its simplicity.  At the time of writing the business is up to $510 on eBay, which is pleasing to see.  But the result of the auction is not really what this has all been about : it was an opportunity for us to put ourselves to the test, to be ambitious and daring, and give our customers and others around the World an intimate insight into how we work as well as what we’re capable of.

Would we do it again?… we’ll get back to you on that once we’ve caught up on a bit more sleep…

What we know is this:

• It starts at midday
• It takes 24 hours
• We’ll have food and drink, but no sleep
• We need computers
• The people involved are all on this twitter list

And, er, that’s it. Dave knows more but he’s keeping it under his hat. Doubtless we’ll be updating some kind of blog, whether it’s this one or elsewhere. We’ll keep you updated.

She may try to tell you that this was an environmentally responsible act, coming down hard on an outrageous waste of electricity, but I think she just fancied a mischievous act of revenge.

UPDATE : The screws and fuse have now been returned to Matt

CSA is about building a mutual relationship between food growers and food consumers so that the risks and responsibilities of food production are shared. There’s loads more info on this on the soil association site.

I joined the group because I’m a bit of a right on eco worrier, because I quite enjoy planting stuff and because I like eating tasty locally grown produce. Perhaps inevitably, I also volunteered to help with the techy side of the website. That meant getting WordPress up and running so that they quickly had a web presence and then working on a customised template for them so that it looked good. White October have also kindly donated the small amount of hosting space required to host the site (thanks Dave).

A bit like the CSA concept, spending a bit of time doing some work for groups like this is mutually beneficial. The group gets a much better looking website than the standard (often shockingly bad) community group fare and I get to expand my skills and knowledge too – in this case I learnt all about how important it is that WordPress templates deal properly with images which are too big. Righton!

The Melbourne-based strategist, known on YouTube as “Simontsmall” posted the clip in reaction to losing the account for the New Zealand vodka brand 42Below, to an unspecified London agency.

With all the gloom and doom in the news, it’s nice to be reminded that we lead the World in the creative industries.

Thanks to Nick Clement via Facebook.