Relevancy Driven Development with Solr

The relevancy of search engine results is very subjective so therefore testing the relevancy of queries is also subjective.
One technique that exists in the information retrieval field is the use of judgement lists; an alternative approach discussed here is to follow the Behaviour Driven Development methodology employing user story acceptance criteria – I’ve been calling this Relevancy Driven Development or RDD for short.

I’d like to thank Eric Pugh for a great discussion on search engine testing and for giving me a guest slot in his ‘Better Search Engine Testing‘ talk* at Lucene EuroCon Barcelona 2011 last week to mention RDD. The first iteration of Solr-RDD combines my passion for automated testing with my passion for Groovy by leveraging EasyB (a Groovy BDD testing framework).

Grails & Hudson / Jenkins Part 5: Monitoring build status

There are a number of ways you can monitor the progress of your Grails build: using the Hudson / Jenkins web app; or leveraging the API: from your IDE, bespoke API clients or even your enterprise monitoring client. We’ll look at all of them here and build a simple Grails taglib to display build status in the ‘Application Status’ panel.

Groovy as a SalesForce API client

We needed a quick way of performing data cleansing and bulk updates to data within SalesForce. As SalesForce is a hosted Software-as-a-Service offering it’s not as simple as resorting to SQL statements – or is it?
Using the Web Services API from Groovy made it quite easy once the foundations were in place.