Easy streets merging with SVN

I was thinking about merging today - what rules represent safe and easy merging - the more I can apply the easier my life would be. This is what I came up with:

• short lived branches
• merge as soon after the change as you can
• tests make you safe
• automated merge procedure
• author takes responsibility for merging if fails automated procedure
• code consists of small classes / methods and has good separation of concerns (thanks to Felix Leipold for that one)

What rules do you try to apply? What do you do when you can't?

Optimising Your Selenium Tests

When a team is using Selenium or Webdriver there are usually a few points in the delivery cycle where the team find the suite of tests is running way too slow and causing pain. Here are a few thoughts on how I go about solving these problems when they turn up.

Not all these problems are technical,  they can apply to any software under test  - particularly any set of acceptance tests. I’ve applied some of these steps when optimising the acceptance tests of some heavyweight C++ libraries.