Last Thursday I had the honor of giving a presentation on Phase 2 of the Canary Islands Waste Information System (GUIRRE) at the Fourth Conference on Sustainability inside the activities for the World Environment Day.

GUIRRE is a very special project for me for several reasons: It was the first time we run a project using continuous integration (Jenkins) and automated tests using Selenium IDE.

At the beginning of the project, before starting to program, we defined a section called ‘How to test it’ for every feature we had to develop. We recorded tests with Selenium, following the steps of the ‘How to test it’ section. Those tests helped to show that the new feature worked properly. If we found a bug, we recorded also a test to reproduce it. When the test became green, we had fixed it.

Every two weeks, we recorded all tests of the current Sprint on a Selenium ‘suite’. Every night, the continuous integration server, Jenkins, ran the suite and all suites from previous Sprints and reported if there had been mistakes. If the previous morning someone had modified a piece of code affecting a functionality developed some months ago, Jenkins showed us some dark clouds.

The other reason GUIRRE is a dear project to me is because we managed to finish under budget (yes, those projects exist) despite we fully assumed the cost of learning Jenkins and Selenium, and that the budget was very adjusted. Quite a challenge.

I leave below a few pictures of the event and a link to the paper I presented. Hope you find it of interest.