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Bringing RAD and Agile Practices to Drupal

Submitted by netaustin on July 20, 2009 - 11:27pm
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The Economist Group has chosen Drupal as its platform for the next version of its flagship site, Economist.com. We have 17 developers spread across five time zones, and chose Agile (specifically Scrum) to manage it all. I'll show you how we leverage industry best agile practices, including Test Driven Development (via SimpleTest, JMeter and Selenium), and Continuous Integration (via Hudson, Drush, and EC2).

Agenda

  • What are RAD, TDD, and Agile, and how do I do these with Drupal? 5 min
  • Agile version control for Drupal 5 min
  • Out of the admin area and into code - versioning your config changes for continuous build. 5 min
  • Implementing continuous build using Hudson, Drush, and Simpletest (and some Bash glue) 15 min
  • Frontend testing with Selenium 5 min
  • Load testing with JMeter 5 min

Goals

If you're new to Drupal but have experience with other RAD frameworks like Rails, Grails, Pylons, Zope, or Django, you'll leave confident that Drupal is capable of matching your testing and build automation expectations. If you're a seasoned Drupal pro, you might pick up a few tricks you haven't seen, and will learn about some great FOSS tools outside of the Drupal universe, like Hudson, Selenium and JMeter.

Resources

This session is related, after a fact, to this one one the same topic submitted for Drupalcon Paris as a panel including me, David Strauss, Josh Koenig, and Moshe Weitzman, and this one given at Drupal Camp UK by my colleague Stewart Robinson.