If you don’t have the source code that goes with your software then that software is a magic black box. You put things into the black box then something else comes out. It’s impossible to know what the black box is really doing, even if you are often told what will happen if you put different things in the box.

With Open Source software the box is transparent. You can open it up and change bits. The box is no longer magic. The box is science.

Allowing everyone to look in and modify the source code has its advantages. It’s much easier to see if there’s problems and anyone can create a fix. You don’t have to trust anyone because no one can hide anything from you any more.

The tech world is gradually moving to Open Source more and more. This means people are sharing their code – making it transparent – improving other people’s and forming support communities. Standards and specifications have been created so different source code is still compatible. People can still sell you a transparent box and you can still pay a company to provide support but you are no longer locked in to that company forever. Companies can also do more in-depth security audits when they can see inside the software.

The thread of Open Source runs though many parts of Base. I’ve used Ubuntu (Linux) instead of a Mac or Windows for a few years and Matt’s now using it too. Most of our web servers run on Open Source operating systems and software. We use WordPress for content managed sites extensively and combine it with front-end Open Source libraries such as jQuery.

At Base we work with whatever solution fits a client’s needs best. Sometimes we work with closed source software but whenever possible we lean towards Open Source. Having the source code to software we’re working with helps us to understand the software and make it bespoke to fit a client’s needs.

The content of these meetings follows a very simple structure;

• What I accomplished yesterday
• What I plan to accomplish today
• What issues are blocking progress

Each person takes a turn to top line (short and sweet) their answers to the three questions above. It can be surprisingly hard to remember everything you did the previous day, but it’s a good way to get your head back into the projects you’re working on and defining where you’re at.

Stand-up meetings can be held anywhere, with only two strict requirements, everyone must stand up, and the meeting should last no longer than 10 minutes total. By standing up you’re more likely to keep everyone’s attention – they’re not sitting comfortably and there are no phones, computers screens and doodle pads to distract you. We hold these stand ups around the meeting table of our studio and in our case allow notepads, as often a single person may need to report on several projects, and it’s important to make sure we cover everything.

no distractions

The time limit imposed is not strictly regulated, but with a maximum of five standing at any one time we rarely go over time. But again this is in place to make sure that we only cover top level information and alert people to any blockers that may be currently holding up, or have the potential to hold up, a project. Anything that requires a more detailed discussion will be parked and taken up one to one after the meeting, or if it requires more than one of us we’ll schedule a time when all those involved can go over it together. This might sound a little like overkill, but it allows us to make sure we can get everyone who needs to be involved together, with enough time to prepare and source any required information for the conversation to be worthwhile, and at a time when it’s not going to impact on something else.

production team only

The standard practice is to only invite production staff to the stand-up meeting, as communication with the client team happens constantly though out the day. Without the client team there to ask additional questions, each person reports back what they know to be true without the meeting taking any unnecessary detours. After the stand-up has concluded, I can then filter back any updates that require it to the client team or hopefully put into action anything that may clear a reported blocker.

Since we started using the stand-up meeting format we’ve found there is an increase in project awareness throughout the company and without doubt we’ve improved efficiency. It has many benefits for us, as it gives everyone a chance to air problems quickly and easily, gives me peace of mind on where we’re at with our targets and means that any one person usually has enough knowledge to discuss a project and its current status if it’s needed. Most of all, everyone leaves knowing exactly what they’re doing, and has their head thinking about the right projects for the day ahead. And that can only be a good start to the day.

You’ll soak up new ideas and techniques like a sponge and have a fantastic enthusiasm for all things digital and in print. Weʼre looking for someone whose designs are the end product of great thinking. Someone who can inspire ideas and help us to shape the agency. You’ll be hands on in the studio working as part of the design team and enjoy building relationships with our clients.

Base culture is one of collaboration, so you’ll enjoy sharing your work and ideas with other designers and disciplines. We build personal development plans and team initiatives to share, inspire, nurture and develop our skills. It’s all about the people.

If all this sounds like you then get in touch, send us some links to your work too. Tell us why you want to work here and what youʼll bring to the team. Weʼd love to hear from you.

Oh, you’ll get paid money and be able to work in a nice place with lovely people – but please donʼt hang around. We want to hear from you right now!

Tips and Tricks

Over the course of our Selenium testing, we’ve discovered a thing or two. Selenium has a lot of quirks (did we mention you can’t type y or full stops? Madness!) so here’s a list of tips and tricks to get you off to a flying start. It’s taken a while to figure these out so hopefully this will save you from the same issues.

Regular Expressions: You can use them! Put regexp:(Your Regex Goes Here) into value, or regexpi for a case-insensitive version. BUT! You cannot use /     / around your regex like you would expect to put around it in PHP or JavaScript normally. If necessary in the context of your regex it is possible to escape them with backslashes but the typical surrounding / / is not required.

Deleting Text: This should save you some time. typeKeys doesn’t like deleting, so we have a couple of options here. You can use three commands in a row: Key Down, Key Press, Key Up. Put them in that order and on all of them, put the value as \8, which is the ASCII code for backspace.

If you want to just delete a few characters, copy and paste the three commands as many times as necessary to cover it (each set of three will delete one character). If you want to clear a text field completely, use the type command (not typekeys) to overwrite the field with one character of your choice, and then use the three commands once to delete that.

Visibility and Hidden fields: Selenium can sometimes find things on your page even if you don’t think they’re there. This tends to happen when they’re in hidden fields. For example, a hidden form field will still trigger assertElementPresent. This is sometimes useful, but what is a man to do when he needs to test if something can’t be seen by the user? The answer is to use Visible rather than Present (so assertElementVisible for example). That sounds like common sense but it’s frustrating when you can’t figure it out so remember it!

Why pause?: Sometimes Selenium tries to go faster than it can actually… well, go. Half the time if something’s not working and you think it should be, it’ll be because the testing is moving onto the next step too fast. Don’t be ashamed to use pauses. Chuck them in everywhere if you have to. If auto-completes are involved, put half a second in between each command by default (sometimes you’ll need to bump that up to a second or a couple seconds).

Wrapping up

By now it should be immediately obvious to most developers that Selenium is useful on big projects with a lot of functionality, and if you’re managing a web project it’s something you should look into for your developers.

However, it’s important to note when and where Selenium is appropriate. On small projects it may not be worth the set up time, nor on projects that don’t have a lot of front-end functionality. If you want to test that your auto complete text field returns correctly for “Yemen” then you’re out of luck until they fix some of the problems.

There are drawbacks, but overall I’d really recommend Selenium to most developers to at least experiment with. Grab it and find what level of automation might work for your bug testing needs.

While Selenium isn’t a substitute for real people, it’ll go a long way to making sure the repetition of testing is as efficient as possible.

Lastly, I personally wouldn’t let it run on any military websites. Just in case it’s working for Skynet. But that’s just me.

Happy testing.

Obviously then, any tool which could help the bug testing process would be immensely useful. Enter Selenium. No longer just the active ingredient in Head and Shoulders Shampoo, Selenium is now an interesting way to test big web projects with a lot of functionality. It’s got a little bit of a learning curve but if used correctly it can dramatically shorten testing time on projects that require lots of input to test.

Seleni-what?

Dave first introduced me to Selenium a short while ago for use on a project, and after getting to grips with it we decided to share what we’ve learned and why we want to see more of Selenium in the future.

remote control your browser

To put it simply, Selenium is a tool for remote controlling your web browser. You give Selenium a list of things to do, broken down into small commands. It then does them for you, one by one, letting you know of any problems it encounters.

A list of commands is referred to as a “Test” which can be run individually, but the real power is in Test Suites. A Test Suite is a collection of tests, which Selenium will run through one by one at the touch of a button, effectively like using a robot to do all your tests for you in one go.

Once you’ve done the initial hard work of setting up what you want to test, all you need to do next time you update something is run your Test Suite to verify that everything still works. This is good because it enables you to make changes or updates and quickly verify whether that change has caused any problems. If problems do exist, they’re easier to identify because Selenium will highlight the command that failed, which you can run again and watch if you need to.

Gimme Gimme Gimme

The first thing you’ll need to do is download yourself Selenium IDE – It comes as a Firefox extension and you can grab it from the top of this page: http://seleniumhq.org/download/

Install it and it’ll be in your Tools section of Firefox. If you’re on a recent version of Firefox you may need to press F10 to make the tools menu appear.

You’ll then be presented with the Selenium window. Your tests go down the left hand side, and the commands (and any comments) can be entered on a test by test basis on the right hand side. Right clicking is your friend: Use it to add new tests (test cases) on the left and new commands or comments on the right.

A log of events, including errors can be found at the bottom of the window, as well as a reference that tries to explain what each command type is about. For the most part it does an average job, so I thought I’d compile the ones you will actually want to know about.

Useful Selenium Commands

Pause: Put a numerical value in milliseconds in the target section to execute a pause. More on this later, you’ll need it!

Click: Does what it says on the tin. Use it to select links, text areas, etc by specifying a target to click on. Target accepts css= as well as support for things like id= and name= without the need to specify that it’s css.

typeKeys: Target should be where you want to type (But always click there first if you can). Value is what to type. Do not use the letter y at any time. Full stops will also not work.

type: If you really, really need to use y or a full stop, you can use type to put them in. At your own risk. The type command is treated more like a stealth copy and paste and therefore won’t trigger things like auto complete menus or most JavaScript based on text input. Type will also overwrite anything currently in the text field.

waitFor: waitFor’s allow you to wait for something before doing something else. Immensely useful when waiting for auto completes to show up, or pages to load. waitForElementPresent is probably the best way to use this, but you can also wait for other things (e.g waitForTextPresent) or use NotPresent instead of Present to verify that something is not there.

assert: Think of asserts as your “End Goal”. If you’re testing whether an image comes up, you would use assertElementPresent and look for it. Like waitFor, you can assert for a huge number of things. All your tests should end with at least one assert which finally determines if the test has been a success.

runScript: If necessary you can call on scripting (such as jQuery you already have on the page) using runScript. Call your function in target.

That covers the most useful commands, but there are many more to try and play with, so I recommend that if this interests you, spend a little time getting to know the command menu and some of its options.

The next part of this article is available here.

I think for me what makes this particular piece of art so enticing is the uniqueness of each pencil. They are a hotchpotch of old remnants, each has experienced its own life of drawing, writing and expressing the owners thoughts and feelings. They each have their own story to tell, their own individual experience, yet they come together to form one rudimentary expression of language in its most basic form – the alphabet. Had the piece of art been created using a standard uniform HB pencil then this concept would have been totally lost. The idea that these pencil stubs have been gleaned from the detritus of the artists studio adds a beautiful layer of their part in the process of art as a whole, not just this individual artist’s practice. So you can imagine my delight when I found out that most of the pencils he uses are found on the streets, abandoned by their owner but now given a second existence despite their sketchy background!!

It is a piece that crosses boundaries between art and design, sculpture and typography, the conceptual and the aesthetic. It combines a simplicity of concept with a sheer beauty of craftsmanship. I began a quest to find out more about this artist and his work, eventually I found his site http://www.daltonmghetti.com. Here you can see a cross section of the work he is producing and exhibiting, but even after looking at the many intricate and what must have been pain staking sculptures, for me ‘Alphabet’ still stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Good content sparks conversation

Both Em and I still get these emails every week, we read them separately; me at work and her at home. Then in the evening the new things it suggests often come up in conversation. Except Em would always have learnt a bit more than me. She’d say things like “oh did you see the bit about rotating the toys so they don’t get boring” and I’d offer up a confused face and a shake of the head, assuming I’d been distracted by something shiny.

This happened a few times and I made a mental note to concentrate and not read them too quickly (It can happen, even if they are good). I read the emails from top to bottom but she was regularly learning more from them than I was. And neither of us could understand how I was missing things.

At first I wondered if mum was getting a different email to dad. Which I figured would be a pretty clever way to target the email, and considering how the site had encouraged us to set up our profiles in the first place (‘Why not add your partner? etc’) that seemed plausible. But we looked at both the emails we’d received and they were identical. No such cleverness.

The penny dropped

It took a while, but then one day the penny dropped. Em was talking about the email but meant the website. To her there wasn’t any difference. All she cared about was learning about the subject.

19 months on and I realised that if an email is interesting enough the line between the content of the email and the article it links to is blurred. If you’re absorbed enough and don’t care about the mechanics of it all, you’ll happily switch from one to the other and not even consider the join. I’m guilty of this because thinking through creating the mechanics is our business, but it’s another great reminder to think like the user. And I have a feeling this applies to a lot of different ‘joins’ too. Twitter to article, website to Flickr, etc.

It connected on an emotional level

There’s something strangely reassuring about receiving this email every week. It has connected on an emotional level with a little bit of virtual support when you need it most. So congrats to the guys that came up with the idea. It’s clever, it feels real and despite knowing that they really just want to sell me baby products, I’m actually happy to engage because they give us something very valuable at a time when it’s most needed.

Hats off, sirs.

HootSuite seeks to be the ultimate tweeting tool for businesses, and it has some interesting features on offer to accomplish that goal. We thought we’d take a closer look at HootSuite, what it is, what it isn’t and whether it could be a good solution for you.

In essence, HootSuite is a combination of tweeting/posting tools with an assortment of project management features. They range from the impressive to the not so impressive, so here’s a rundown of what you can get:

The More the Merrier:

Many people can manage one account. This has many uses, especially if your company maintains one company account or one big customer service account as opposed to lots of personal accounts.

Get Organised:

Set tasks for other members of your tweet team (e.g “Can someone respond to this customer”) and schedule automatic posts for certain times to make sure your account can still pump things out when you’re busy doing other things.

Syncing:

The obvious feature for almost all these apps lately is synchronisation across all your social accounts, including Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and some things people don’t use so much anymore like Ping.fm. Personally I don’t rate this as a useful feature, mainly because for me, different social networks need different content. I wouldn’t post the same content on Twitter as a WordPress blog post or vice versa. Nonetheless, if you like cross-posting, you’re catered for here.

Local Knowledge:

Of potential benefit to some companies is language localization, currently offered in Japanese, Italian and French flavours. If you’re an international business with international needs, this could be useful.

Stat Attack:

Hootsuite offers the ability to track numerous things, including links clicked, keywords mentioned, facebook likes and follows. These stats can be assessed in real time or you can export some reports with fancy looking graphs for your next social strategy presentation to the board.

What’s the catch?

There’s always one. HootSuite hides it’s best features behind a paywall, with some of the most compelling additions like multiple team members to manage accounts and stat reporting eluding you unless you’re willing to cough up $5.99 a month and an extra $15 a month for every additional “team member”. An ad-supported, free version is available with the bare minimum.

If you listen carefully you can just about hear thousands of Android users spitting out their tea at the very mention of paying for an application. iPhone users may be more accustomed to opening their wallets for the sake of interesting apps, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that there are many good, free applications that offer social media functions and that makes HootSuite difficult to recommend to the majority.

Customer relations management:

If you’re an organisation looking to have a customer service team manage a support account or something of that nature, then you might find HootSuite to be a good investment as one thing it appears to do well is support groups of people tweeting.

If that’s not what you’re after then for now I wholeheartedly recommend TweetDeck, my go-to Twitter client.