testdriven.com Wrangling quality out of chaos

High-quality usability of mobile applications can be a winning competitive advantage in the today’s software market.

Nonetheless, BugHuntress QA Lab experience in independent software testing showed that high-quality user interfaces occurred in about 70% of desktop applications, while a similar number for mobile applications is about 40%.

This article covers the following topics:
– What usability is in brief;
– Basic standards of the user interface;
– Mobile standards;
– Mobile interface peculiarity: left-handed mode; speed vs. satisfaction; landscape mode;
– General problems of mobile usability;
– Successful solutions;
– Automation of usability testing;
– Independent usability testing services.
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Software testing company BugHuntress QA Lab offers expert-level testing of software products, independent verification and validation (IV&V), as well as dedicated testing team services. BugHuntress core expertise is testing of embedded hardware-software systems, wireless / mobile applications, mobile internet, Web 2.0, e-Business systems. BugHuntress performs automated and manual testing of functionality, usability, load, performance, compatibility, and other types of testing. High level of services is confirmed by long-term cooperation with a number of the clients from the USA and the EU.

BugHuntress QA Lab
info@bughuntress.com
www.bughuntress.com
Ukraine, Eastern Europe
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Fixture Gallery is a cookbook for FIT/FitNesse tests. It provides developers with a quick overview of the most important fixture types and concepts for agile acceptance testing using the FIT framework. For each fixture type, this document explains the table format and fixture class structure and provides advice when to use and when not to use it. Each example is accompanied by the source code for Java and .NET FIT implementations, in a form that can be easily copied and used as a template for similar fixtures.

See http://gojko.net/fitnesse/fixturegallery/ for more information and download links.

SevenMock v1.1 has now been released – extending the light-weight mock object implementation with a class extension sub-project. This allows generated mock objects to be cast directly to classes as well as interfaces – which will prove useful for anyone who wants to mock classes that don’t implement defined interfaces.

I am pleased to finally announce version 1.0 of DbFit. DbFit is a set of FIT fixtures which enables FIT/FitNesse tests to execute directly against a database. This enables developers to manipulate database objects in a relational tabular form, making database testing and management much easier than with xUnit-style tools. The library is free to use, released under GNU GPL.

Version 1.0 (2008-03-10) is a major cleanup release. Grab it from [url=http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=191053&package_id=224326]SourceForge[/url].

Major updates

1. Support for in-out parameters in stored procedures.
2. Support for querying stored results
3. Support for SQL Server 2000 in .NET. Not as complete as Sql Server 2005, but should work in most cases.
4. Support for testing blank-padded fixed length CHAR types.
5. .NET version now compiled with FitNesse.NET 1.5
6. Proper documentation — finally. The documentation is available as PDF and FitNesse (included in the dbfit-complete package) and also online at FitNesse.Info.

Minor updates

1. Oracle date used as Timestamp to allow V8 compatibility switch to work
2. Stored procedure params no longer have to be listed in the same order as in db
3. GUID handler now just redirecting to standard GUID handler in .NET
4. OrderedQuery and StoreParameter fixtures for standalone mode
5. bugfix for transactions not getting rolled back in Java after tests in flow mode
6. bugfix for ntext and text field sizes in sql server
7. bugfix for fail[null] NullPointerException in Java
8. workaround for fail[null] bug in fitnesse.net 1.5
9. Acceptance tests now reorganised better.

Many thanks to Marisa Seal for her help with the documentation and Oscar Centeno for his help with Sql Server 2000 implementation.

For more information on DbFit, see http://fitnesse.info/dbfit/

–
gojko adzic
http://gojko.net

The Good News: there are now 3 projects that do selective testing in java – Testar, JTestMe, Infinitest
The Bad News: each is in various stages of incompleteness.

Yet I am encouraged and hope that progress will be swift in this area.

I see three major use cases for selective testing:

* Running tests while editing your code just as modern IDEs compile your code on the fly. The best example of this approach is Infinitest.
* Making the smoke test build fast. (Often the smoke test is run as a pre-submit test for the code to be committed to the repository)
* Quick feedback from acceptance/integration/QA tests. This is best achieved with a build grid to run these tests in parallel.

Java mocking is dominated by expect-run-verify libraries like EasyMock or jMock. Mockito offers simpler and more intuitive approach: you ask questions about interactions after execution. Using mockito, you can verify what you want, without expensive setup upfront. Mockito aims to be transparent and let the developer to focus on testing selected behavior.
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A few days ago I had a session at a .NET conference in Germany (BASTA Spring 2008). I talked about software quality assurance and especially test driven development. Because of many people asking me about the details and the source code of my talk I wrote an article about TDD (including TDD of Web-UIs) with Visual Studio 2008 and WatiN: Bug Busters – Test Driven Development in .NET.

The article shows a sample application that is developed according to test driven development principles. It shows how to add data access- and business-layer (based on Linq-to-SQL) and how to build unit tests for ASP.NET forms.

I hope you find it interesting to read.

Kind regards,
Rainer

This is a database build tool that changes how databases are built to enable truly test-driven development. Which, in turn, enables true refactoring. Which enables true agility in the database world.
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All technical articles put out by Hexagon Software LLC, which is a company that produces tools for agile software developers.
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I firmly believe in the principles of Lean and Agility. However, the practices we’ve refined for Agile software development do not translate well from the world of programming to databases.

This is part of a series of articles in which I investigate why.
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I’ve written an article re-evaluating how we test our databases. It is part of a series of articles rethinking agility as it pertains to databases..