KDAB helped iDev to get started with Squish and asked Christian Hönig, lead developer at iDev, about what it was like. KDAB says, Squish is indeed a powerful tool, and from previous engagement with customers using Squish we’ve seen that getting on the right track from the beginning is a worthwhile investment.
KDAB: Christian, first of all thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with the rest of us. It would be interesting if you could tell us a bit about what you are using Qt and Squish for.
iDev: We are developing a client-server-based system used for point-of-sale-terminals. Currently we have about eight different smart clients developed with Qt which are used to encash, to do administrative jobs and to view statistical values all around our centralized server. We have a big release test document which has to be run manually before every release. As the document grew far too big lately, we decided to give Squish a try … again. (We already used it about three years ago, but we abandoned it as it was too complicated to keep things running.) Since Squish has improved a lot, and we have help getting started this time, we expect things to go better now.
KDAB: Next, Tobias Nätterlund came onsite and worked with you for two weeks. Can you tell our readers about how that time was spent?
iDev: We started out on optimizing our current squish development environment which consists of an autobuilder, clients and servers. We worked in pairs, as usual in XP, and integrated Tobias in our team. After the development environment was running fine, we started to convert the manual release test to Squish.
For us, this release test is kind of a specification of our software, so we had to find a solution to generate a human readable document from our Squish tests. Together with Tobias we developed a nice framework to achieve this: The Squish-test now logs human readable documentation (in tex) while it is running.
Most of the rest of the two weeks we spent writing tests and learning from Tobias how to work around the little nastinesses of squish.
In all, we had a very nice time together and if he wants to join our team he is always welcome ;-).
KDAB: Thanks for your time, and we wish you all the best in your future with Squish.
