testdriven.com Wrangling quality out of chaos

Despite a prevalent industry perception to the contrary, the agile practices of Test-Driven Development and Continuous Integration can be successfully applied to embedded software. We present here a holistic set of practices, platform independent tools, and a new design pattern (Model Conductor Hardware – MCH) that together produce: good design from tests programmed first, logic decoupled from hardware, and systems testable under automation. Ultimately, this approach yields an order of magnitude or more reduction in software flaws, predictable progress, and measurable velocity for data-driven project management. We use the approach discussed herein for real-world production systems and have included a full C-based sample project to illustrate it.
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WebLOAD.org is a community site for professional performance testing of internet applications, hosting the WebLOAD free open source project. This project is based on twelve years of code development invested in the previously proprietary WebLOAD, the award winning commercial performance testing solution for internet applications from Radview Software . WebLOAD is a great starting point for this project, with a community of more than 1,600 customers and a track record established on the merits of its robust functionality, efficient architecture, extensibility, support, quality and its ease of use.
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This article discusses when to use TDD, how to use it successfully, and its role in the context of up-front design.
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Datatect generates realistic test data to a Flat File or any ODBC compliant Database.
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The Pragmatic Studio is excited to announce the Agile Developer Studio, designed exclusively to help you and your teams succeed through agility.

In this three day workshop, you’ll learn what being agile is all about, by actually doing it! You’ll also learn how to transition your project or organization from conventional approaches to agile development practices that save time and money.

You’ll be expertly coached by Andy Hunt (of The Pragmatic Programmers) and Venkat Subramaniam, co-authors of "Practices of an Agile Developer". Drawing from their vast project experience, they’ll help you become a better, more agile, developer.
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JSXUnit uses Microsoft’s new JavaScript (called Managed JScript). It can be used within the new Silverlight browser-plugin (version 1.1). If you have the plug in, you can try the new version of the testing framework now. Alpha only. Not for production use (yet). This is a port of JSNUnit 2.7.
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As well as being an introduction to Mock Object testing using EasyMock, this article goes into detail on some of the framework’s features. Features a downloadable project containing the examples used in the article.
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Mayford Technologies specializes in the delivery of Agile Software Development services. We provide coaching and training services in Testing and Refactoring, Test-Driven Development, and Agile Development Transitions.
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The further I dig into new product development practices the more I crave a simple way of helping folks new to the concepts visualize them quickly. In that spirit, I’ve assembled a little pictorial journey through the intriguing landscapes of waterfall, agile, portfolio management and stage gate. For fun, there is also a description of how you can apply portfolio management techniques to individual agile project as a technique for additionally reducing the design risk.

Author: Danc
Published: February 18, 2007
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Test Driven Development samples are mostly based on very simple unit tests. The challenge is often how to use TDD in a larger application. It will be demonstrated in this tutorial how to build a web application using test first principles using Selenium and Castle.

Author: Dan Bunea
Published: InfoQ, February 20, 2007
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The JBI Mock Framework is a set of classes allowing developers to test JBI components at a unit level, mocking out the Normalized Message Router (NMR). Using the mock classes, developers can achieve high test coverage for their JBI Components. It provides:

- Mock interfaces and Basic implementations for the majority of JBI interfaces
- Mock classes to write unit tests for Binding Components and Service Engines
- Examples showing how to use the Spring Framework and JUnit to create a unit test
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Talk about Test Driven Development and how to implement Design By Contract in the Ruby programming language.

Author: Jim Weirich
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nose provides an alternate test discovery and running process for unittest, one that is intended to mimic the behavior of py.test as much as is reasonably possible without resorting to too much magic.
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Slides from a Code Mash presentation on Test Driven Development in Python. They provide an introduction to TDD, some tools that work well when doing TDD in python, and the results of a case study in TDD game development using pygame.

Author: Kevin Dahlhausen
Posted: January 22, 2007
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JDave is a BDD framework for Java. It is inspired by rspec and integrates JMock as mocking framework. It currently uses JUnit adapter to launch JDave specifications. This way it is possible to have IDE and build tool support from day one.
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Large development projects can be difficult to manage. With multiple developers committing source code to one source tree, there are going to be times when code breaks and will not work. Running automated builds and tests on code can drastically reduce the time and effort developers spend fixing issues by catching them early. This process is called continuous integration. This article provides an overview of how to implement continuous integration in a PHP project using tools written in PHP.

Author: Chad Files
Published: Linux.com, March 12, 2007
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DbFit is an extension of .Net2 FIT test runner which enables FIT/FitNesse tests to execute directly against a database. Supports testing stored procedures and functions, executing queries and statements on Oracle. Support for SqlServer is currently in development.
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In the fourth edition of the Stelligent Early Quality Podcast series, Paul Duvall and Levent Gurses discuss how Continuous Integration can be simplified with two popular tools: CruiseControl and Maven 2.

If you’re looking to intensify your CI and testing process and want to learn more about how these tools can help, this podcast will be a valuable resource for you.
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The Ejb3Unit project will automate Entity and Session bean testing outside the container for the EJB 3.0 specification. Ejb3Unit can execute automated standalone JUnit test for all EJB 3.0 conform J2EE projects. EJb3Unit is using an in memory database by default but also can be configured for a user defined target database if necessary. Testdata can be provided by in various ways, for instance comma seperated file, data generators or constants.
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SpiraTest is an integrated requirements, test case and defect management system.

It allows project managers to develop the project requirements / scope matrix upfront with the customers (i.e. a story list), then hand it off to developers who build out the use / test cases that validate the functionality.

Finally during UAT, users can execute the test cases in the environment and log associated defects. These can then be used to generate requirements coverage reports and test stability reports.

Current version requires Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and SQL Server 2000+.
Price starts at $299.99…
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Testilence is an open-source unit testing library written in PHP 5 for programs written in PHP 5. It is published under the MIT license which means you are free and welcome to use it in any way. Although it is similar to other JUnit-inspired unit testing libraries, Testilence is written with emphasis on what’s useful, not what’s usual. That said, most clever ways of doing useful things for unit test authors and users have already been discovered. Testilence combines original ideas with the best features found in different unit-testing toolkits into a coherent set.
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Directory of tools useful for development: Programming, Testing, Configuration Management, Database Project Planning and Management, Modeling.
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Successful practitioners will have noticed that Agile relies heavily on discipline, rather than genius. For this reason, there is an emphasis on the practice of the basics: putting people first, focusing on value, delivering high-quality work frequently, and reflecting regularly to continue improving. Average teams, even in the early stages of Agile implementation, can achieve dramatic performance improvement if they are disciplined. As we do these things, the effects of our words and actions actively create, and re-create over time, the environment in which our teams and projects operate.

Authors: Gujan Doshi, Deborah Hartmann
Published: InfoQ, January 25, 2007
See also: Good Agile Karma reminder, Cheat sheet
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Checkstyle is a development tool to help programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard. It automates the process of checking Java code to spare humans of this boring (but important) task. This makes it ideal for projects that want to enforce a coding standard.

Plug-ins available for major IDEs. Includes an ant task to integrate reformatting into the build process.
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I’ve recently had a lot of discussions about the notion of Test-Driven Development and Continuous Integration and how they can be used together to achieve superior code quality and performance. We have discussed a key facet of Test-Driven Development in the Enterprise Java Testing section of the Java Reference Guide, namely defining unit test cases with JUnit, but I thought this was a good opportunity to discuss how it can be integrated into a Continuous Integration framework to perform these tests on each developer commit.

Author: Steven Haines
Last updated: informit.com, January 12, 2007
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