I love Test Driven Development (TDD). If you look back through the posts on this blog that soon becomes apparent. I’m pretty comfortable with using TDD techniques at all levels of a solution, from the tiniest code snippet to multiply-redundant collaborating systems. Of course, the difficulty of actually coding the tests in a test-driven design …
Continue reading ‘Functional Testing, BDD and domain-specific languages’ »
I just watched an interesting and entertaining talk about behavior-driven development (BDD or ATDD). Gojko Adzic – BDD: Busting the myths on Vimeo on Vimeo Well worth a look, particularly if you are worried that BDD or automated acceptance tests do not make sense, or are not helping your business.
test-Driven development (TDD) is a very powerful and beneficial approach to developing software. I routinely recommend it as a solution to untested and hard-to maintain software. However, every rule has its exceptions and there are occasions when a pure TDD approach is not very helpful. Mark Needham wrote a recent blog post on the subject …
It’s happened on most reasonable sized projects I have worked on. The benefits of test coverage an continuous integration are obvious and pay back immediately. But, somehow, as the project grows and diversifies, a point is reached where the complexity and run time of the CI process begins to slow down development rather than assist …
There has been a lot of speculation and worry about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, so it’s nice to see some positive aspects. Here’s one about an improved attitude to automated testing. One of the results of the Oracle purchase of Sun has been an increased focus on testing — not that we didn’t test GlassFish …
Continue reading ‘A good aspect of the Oracle/Sun purchase’ »
A conference presentation from RubyFringe, designed to be contentious. There are some good points, particularly about the way that different approaches to testing can complement each other, but I think he misses the point about TDD when he lumps it in with developer unit testing and ignores the design aspects of the technique. InfoQ: Testing …
I sometimes have to suppress a shudder when people use the term “best practice”. Despite a positive sounding name, the idea of “best practice” is almost always used in a way that is restrictive rather than enabling. Declaring one approach or solution as “best practice” by implication shuts out other answers. I will admit that …
Continue reading ‘Context and problems with “Best Practice”’ »
Every now and then we discuss ways of better automating the manual tests which accompany our web applications. This is especially poignant right now as both the development and test teams have been recently reduced in size. We have had some success with Watir in the past, but it was always dependent on Internet Explorer …
I love this idea. Pseudo-random test cases to simulate mass usage by “realistic but sometimes thoughtless” users. Especially when augmented with audit trails so that failures can be easily repeated for fixing. DanNorth.net » Monkey business value This impatient monkey – dancingmango
A hot topic in software development circles at the moment is the interaction and demarcation between “developers” and “testers”. Development uses an agile approach but it’s sometimes hard to see how this sits with the testing folks, particularly as most stories seem to move snappily through development then pile up in testing. Sometimes it seems …
Continue reading ‘The Correct Ratio of Agile Testers to Developers? It Depends.’ »
The British Computer Society (BCS) is supposedly the professional institution in the UK which represents anyone working in the field of Information Technology (IT). I have been an associate member for many years, and most years I consider upgrading my membership to become a full member but have never actually done so. Usually the problem …
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Our agile team is finding some things challenging. In particular deciding how to prioritise and work on “bugs” in the midst of a pool of prioritised and scheduled feature stories. “Agile In Action” has a nice summary of an approach to software development. Most agile practitioners won’t find anything to object to. AGILE IN ACTION: …
This looks like an interesting project. I’m slightly worried by the way that it seems to embody the one class === one test assumption, but if that doesn’t get in the way of other forms of unit testing it could be useful. moreUnit – Home
I’m currently working on some software which sends notifications to users (using SMS, email, or whatever) and have faced the inevitable problems with testing it. On balance I’d prefer not to receive a test SMS on my mobile phone every time our continuous integration system runs an end-to-end test. Gojko Adzic has some thoughts about …
Continue reading ‘How to test e-mail notifications properly’ »
I develop almost all my code these days using Test Driven Development (TDD). By taking this approach I never bother about unit test code coverage, but some developers seem very concerned by it. One thing that I have never considered doing is retroactively adding tests just to increase some code-coverage metric. Dan Manges has written …
Continue reading ‘Increasing Code Coverage May Be Harmful’ »
As we attempt to spread agile, continual, iterative, processes throughout the company, there is a growing confusion as to when things are actually ready for release. The old “waterfall” notion of a complex and detailed advance specification, backed up by months of laborious manual testing is no longer applicable. In most ways this is a …
As software testing spreads out in scope from the old notion of manual exercising of a system into areas such as developer unit tests and automated acceptance tests, the issue of ownership becomes more important. In this short and pithy post Kristan Vingrys states his opinion. Vinktank | Who owns automated acceptance tests?
I’ll put my cards on the table. At heart I am a “classic TDD” guy. My first attempt at any new code is to test return values or side-effects rather than immediately jump to setting up mock objects and testing interactions. Although I do use mock objects as a testing technique from time to time …
This slightly provocative post examines the role of QA (a.k.a testing) in various view of a project lifecycle and considers how we might react to a QA team which reported no bugs. Ryan Greenhall: What is The Role of QA?
A fascinating counterpoint to Gojko Adzic‘s writings on acceptance testing in an agile process. thekua.com@work » Automated story-based acceptance tests lead to unmaintainable systems Update: here’s some more discussion on this topic, and how it is affected by the nature of user stories User Stories are Just Schedulable Change