Articles on Process

Jared Carroll

The rise in popularity of JavaScript, especially on the server-side, has introduced more and more developers to asynchronous programming. Asynchronous, event-driven programming also requires a change in testing. In this post, we’ll look at how three popular JavaScript testing frameworks support testing asynchronous code.

Jared Carroll

The Android framework contains several familiar and new architectural patterns. Fortunately, testing was not forgotten. In this post, we’ll develop a simple app test-first, exploring both functional and unit testing in Android. We’ll be using the latest Android API, 4.1, and working entirely from the command-line. All the code is available on github.

Jonah Williams

On recent projects I’ve been trying to practice a little bit of readme driven development and trying to demand that the project maintain a useful readme. Theoretically the contents of the readme are things the entire development team is familiar with. Capturing them in a readme has still proven to be a useful exercise which …

Christian Nelson

Carbon Five and Good Eggs are joining up to show off some of the projects they’ve recently worked with an emphasis on the technology that made them possible. We want to share what we think is interesting and what we’ve learned along the way. Genetic Symphony – A Genentech, IDEO, and Carbon Five collaboration for …

David Hendee

This is the first in a series of posts highlighting Lean UX practices at Carbon Five. They are presented as ‘recipes’ for you try out for yourself, then alter them to make them your own. While more and more of our clients are engaging us in full-service design/build projects, we still enjoy working with outside …

Jared Carroll

Integrating with an external API is almost a guarantee in any modern web app. To effectively test such integration, you need to stub it out. A good stub should be easy to create and consistently up-to-date with actual, current API responses. In this post, we’ll outline a testing strategy using stubs for an external API.

Jared Carroll

The RSpec Book defines outside-in Rails development as starting with views and working your way in toward the models. By developing from the outside in, you are always taking a client perspective at each layer of the application. The end result is an absolute minimum implementation, consisting of simple, expressive interfaces. Outside-in development doesn’t require …

Christian Nelson

Last week we had a lively discussion about Agile development at Carbon Five. It was fun telling the story of how we got started with Agile nearly a decade ago. We discussed how it helps us deliver value and deal with the challenges we face as a services company. Here’s a summary of that conversation… How …

Christian Nelson

We just wrapped up the first phase of a project for ITVS, the Independent Television Service, and want to share the experience. We built OVEE, the online video engagement experience, on a short schedule with a small team. OVEE is a highly-interactive application built using node.js, mongodb, and a slew of other new tools/frameworks. Our …

Jared Carroll

Last month, cucumber-rails 1.1 was released. This release removed web_steps.rb, a collection of step definitions for interacting with a web app. For months, web_steps.rb contained a warning of its negative effects on feature maintenance. Like most developers, I ignored the warning. During a recent upgrade of an existing Rails app, I realized it was now …