response.setHeader("Set-Cookie", "cookie_name=cookie_value; HTTPOnly=");

By setting this flag you basically prevent any JavaScript from accessing the session cookie. Rails now sets this flag by default which makes it less vulnerably against cross scripting attacks.
You can find all information you need including a list of supporting browsers here

Grab the session cookie by calling:

session_cookie = @selenium_driver.get_eval('window.document.cookie')

Then grab the resource through a http request within the selenium rc test:

resource = Net::HTTP.new(host, port).start { |http|
   get = Net::HTTP::Get.new(path_to_resource)
   get['Cookie'] = session_cookie
   response = http.request(get)
   response.body
}

It works fine for a Rails app and i guess this principle should be applicable for any other server with cookie based session handling.

java -cp ./hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.Server -database.0 mem:mydb -dbname.0 aliasdb

Instead of passing the database setup as parameters you can put them into a server.properties file which has to be in the same directory where you execute the command.

Then use this url to connect to your database:

jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost/aliasdb

I strongly believe we can live very well without task estimation in agile projects. Most of the estimation effort should be put into story estimation to enable project tracking. Thus in alignment to the pattern of the agile manifesto:

Project and story tracking over iteration and task tracking

@Service
public class HelloService {
 
    public String sayHello() {
        return "Hello! I'm a service";
    }
}
 
@Component
public class SomeComponent {
 
    @Autowired
    private HelloService service;
 
    public String saySomething() {
        return service.sayHello();
    }
}

It’s as simple as that. The classes are annotated with @Service and @Component to be considered as candidates for auto-detection as i prefer to have as little XML configuration as possible. Thus the applicationContext.xml is quite simple:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.5.xsd">
 
    <context:annotation-config/>
    <context:component-scan base-package="org.playground.di"/>
</beans>

Of course we usually would start out by writing tests first. But how can we write unit tests for SomeComponent when we don’t have access to the field and inject a mock object? Luckily the developers of Spring thought of that and provide us with a class called ReflectionTestUtils which is available since Spring 2.5. For this unit test i’ll use Mockito to mock out HelloService.

public class SomeComponentUnitTest {
 
    @Mock
    private HelloService mockService;
 
    @Before
    public void initMocks() {
        MockitoAnnotations.initMocks(this);
    }
 
    @Test
    public void shouldUseMockService() {
 
        SomeComponent component = new SomeComponent();
        ReflectionTestUtils.setField(component, "service", mockService);
 
        String expectedMessage = "I'm from a mock";
        Mockito.stub(mockService.sayHello()).toReturn(expectedMessage);
 
        String actualMessage = component.saySomething();
 
        verify(mockService).sayHello();
 
        Assert.assertEquals(actualMessage, expectedMessage);
    }
}

To complete our testing we also gonna write an integration test:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations = {"classpath:applicationContext.xml"})
public class SomeComponentIntegrationTest {
 
    @Autowired
    private SomeComponent consumer;
 
    @Test
    public void shouldSaySomething() {
 
        String expectedMessage = "Hello! I'm a service";
 
        String actualMessage = consumer.saySomething();
 
        Assert.assertEquals(expectedMessage, actualMessage);
    }
}

A common response i get to this question is: Agile will make us deliver faster. Though possibly true if you are a mature Agile organization i don’t think this is what Agile is about in the first place. Is going fast really what you’re after?

In my opinion the most basic driver is to generate business value as early as possible by delivering working software. This is different from just going fast as you can deliver quickly but not the right thing to produce value. Generating early business value is only possible if the team works on the most important things first. It requires high involvement from the business and continuous collaboration throughout the project to make sure the team generates value. Apparently this is often neglected by traditional organizations through their functional structure and thinking in silos.

Another basic driver for Agile is removing pain points and obstacles in the delivery process. This driver is highly influenced by Lean thinking. You look at your delivery process and ask the question: What is our biggest problem in delivering high quality, working software. You identify the biggest problem, look at the root cause, fix it and look for the next biggest problem. You do this continuously and you actually will go faster as you are removing your obstacles step by step. Typical examples for pain points and obstacles are functional teams rather than cross-functional teams, manual testing rather than automated testing or communication through documentation rather than face-to-face communication and finding placeholders for conversation.

Having these basic drivers is great but there is a tension between these two drivers. If you only go for business value you will end up with heaps of technical debt. Technical debt can be generated by a change of direction to tackle the most important things first. Or by the simple fact that the team gains more and more knowledge about the system and domain from iteration to iteration. Technical debt also tends to have a high interest rate and the longer you wait to remove technical debt the higher the interest rate will get. On the other hand if you concentrate your effort purely on removing technical debt you will lose focus on business value or won’t deliver business value at all.

Hence the trick is to find the right balance between the two drivers when you plan your iterations. Deliver business value but also allocate time to tackle your biggest problem. I can’t really tell you the right balance but if you are new to Agile i would recommend to favor removing your biggest problem over delivering business value as it will have a long term effect on your overall delivery.

So how does an Acceptance Criteria look like? Let’s say we have a simple user story called “Login”:

As a registered user i want to log in so that i can view my personalized report

Acceptance Criteria are then described as scenarios. As an expample let’s look at a typical main success scenario for the user story above:

Given a registered user u
When entering username FooFoo and password BarBar
And logging in
Then the personalized report for user u is shown.

A story can have as many Acceptance Criteria as necessary to consider it as done. Don’t be fooled to believe you can define every Acceptance Criteria upfront. As the team gains more and more knowledge while proceeding in an iteration more Acceptance Criteria may be discovered. Your initial set of Acceptance Criteria should be enough to make everyone comfortable to deliver that story.

So why this format of “Given” “When” “Then”? On my current project we use RSpec, a Behavior Driven Development framework for Ruby. You start by writing your stories with the scenarios in plain text files:

Story: Login
  As a registered user
  I want to log in
  So that i can view my personalized report
 
  Scenario: login successful
    Given a registered user u
    When entering username FooFoo and password BarBar
    And logging in
    Then the personalized report for user u is shown.

Each Given, When, Then is a step and i can define these steps in Ruby:

steps_for(:login) do
  Given("a registered user $user") do | user |
    user.should exsist
  end
  When("entering username $username and password $password") do | username, password |
    page.type(username, account)
  end
  When("logging in") do
    page.login
  end
  Then("the personalized report for user $user is shown") do | user |
    page.should be_personalized_for(user) 
  end
end

The great thing about this is that you can reuse the steps for other scenarios and hook up the RSpec framework with functional testing tools like Selenium or Frankenstein to have real end-to-end testing. In addition you can integrate the tests into the Continuous Integration server to have automated regression testing. The effort the team puts into fledging out Acceptance Criteria is directly translated into automated test code producing minimal waste.