testdriven.com Wrangling quality out of chaos

On August 3, Agitar has announced that Kent Beck had become an Agitar Software Fellow.

In the press release, Kent Beck says: "There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations. Accountability is expected from every other profession in the world, and now software developers are being held accountable too. Developer Testing is a important step towards accountability. It gives developers a way to demonstrate the quality of the software they produce. Developing transparently, they become more productive by wasting less time reworking errors."Kent Beck co-wrote the [url=http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/singlelink.php?cid=4&lid=3] JUnit[/url] tool for unit-testing java code with Erich Gamma, wrote the ground-breaking book on eXtreme Programming, in which he better defined TDD as a methodology, co-authored [url=http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/singlelink.php?cid=18&lid=188]Contributing to Eclipse[/url], and more recently published [url=http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/singlelink.php?cid=10&lid=39]Test-Driven Development, by Example[/url].

Agitator intelligently exercises Java code to discover its behavior and presents observations to the developer. Developers can convert Agitator’s observations into unit-tests with a single click. This unique process, called "Software Agitation," helps developers create thorough sets of reusable unit tests. Agitation lets developers edit and enhance their code with confidence, helping them prevent errors as they write or modify their programs.

Agitar won this year’s Duke’s Choice Award for Agitator.

Visit Agitar.
Read Agitar’s press release.

More info: [url=http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/singlelink.php?cid=7&lid=456]Article on Agitator[/url].

From the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform project page:

"Our aim is to incorporate into our planning process the innovations that arise once a project is underway, and the feedback from our user community on our achievements to date. An agile development and planning process, in which progress is incremental, near-term deliverables are focused, and long-term planning is flexible, will be the best way to achieve this."

How to join the Project.

Roy Osherove just introduced NUnitX, a custom compile of NUnit integrating the Rollback attribute, allowing seamless database rollback.

The method uses "Services without components", and draws upon the ServiceDomain and the ServiceConfig classes found in the System.EnterpriseServices namespace.

By placing the RollbackAttribute on a test method, the test case runs inside its own transaction context, and rolls back automatically at the end of the test.

Read Roy’s announcement.

MSDN Architecture will hold a Live Meeting Webcast on patterns & practices covering Test Driven Development.

The Webcast will be held on July 15, 2004, from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM Pacific Time (GMT-8, US & Canada). It will be led by Jim Newkirk, Development Lead at Microsoft Corporation and co-author of the book [url=http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/singlelink.php?cid=10&lid=337]Test Driven Development in Microsoft .NET[/url].Description from MSDN:

In Kent Beck’s book titled "Test-Driven Development, By Example" he defines Test-Driven Development (TDD) as driving software development with automated tests. He goes further by stating that TDD is governed by two simple rules: Write new code only if an automated test has failed and eliminate duplication. The implications of these two simple rules can proffer a profound change to the way that software is written. Most of the literature to date has bundled TDD along with Extreme Programming (XP). However, the benefits of using TDD are not limited to XP, and can be realized in any programming methodology. This webcast will provide an introduction into TDD, demonstrating how it works and what benefits it provides when used with Microsoft® .NET. The examples shown will be in Visual C#® and run in the Community Tech Preview of Visual Studio 2005 Team System. For copies of the slides see the Test-Driven Development workspace on GotDotNet.

Click [url=http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032254470&EventCategory=1]here[/url] for further information about the Webcast.

I have just put the finishing touches to RUnit 1.0

http://www.ruxp.net/runit.asp

RUnit lets you develop and use regular NUnit test harnesses and call them inside ASP.NET applications. While the NUnit GUI can be used to test business logic in ASP.NET applications, it falls down on testing applications that use ASP.NET features such as the HttpContext or the Cache object.

Full source code is provided.

Comments and feedback welcome.

J. B. Rainsberger’s book, JUnit Recipes, is finally complete and will be in book stores before the end of July. The Early Access Program at Manning Publications has ended. J.B. would like to thank his review community again for all their hard work and looks forward to many happy readers.

(Note: description of the book is available [url=http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/singlelink.php?cid=17&lid=332]here[/url])

Brian Marick is writing a book on customer/story testing, and will be e-publishing draft chapters for review.

The book will cover a specific trade of the agile methodology, where teams collaborate to drive development with a series of self-checking examples (customer/story tests). Programmers, working in a tight iterative loop, make the product match the examples.

Brian will make case studies, stories, and tricks of the trade an important part of the book, and welcomes all relevant input on the subject.From Brian’s blog:

"I’ve started work on a book, tentatively titled Driving Projects with Examples: a Handbook for Agile Teams. All that’s done to date is the Preface.

Some of you practice the style of development I’m documenting – or variants of it. If you do, I want to talk to you, be it on the phone, or via email, or in person. (I am budgeting travel money to visit worthy sites.) I’m serious about the ‘handbook’ in the title: I want to fill it with tricks, tips, techniques, and stories. The more people I gather them from, the better the book will be."

Visit the book’s site, read the Preface.
Join the book’s mailing list.

Production grammar is an intuitive and efficient way to create an automated test cases generator.

The Production Grammar Framework (PGF), [d]to be part of a later release of [url=http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/singlelink.php?cid=3&lid=251]MbUnit[/url][/d], now released as TestFu, provides a lightweight .NET framework for implementing and executing grammars.By using the same idea as EBNF notation, production grammar inverts the procedure by using the grammar to generate output instead of parsing input. Therefore, complex behavior can be modelled and used to generate test cases, directly drive the IUT, etc…

Read Production Grammar Framework for .NET and applications to Software Testing for more information about PGF.

Darrell introduces the Code of the Month: "The basic idea of the code of the month is to highlight an open source software program. Download it, use it, and read the code. If you’re motivated enough, write an extension to it or fix a bug or two, but the key is to get in there and read the code."

The first Code of the Month for July is NUnit.

bwbUnit for Java is a set of components primarily geared towards assisting developers with unit testing. The components that make up bwbUnit are designed to be simple to use yet very powerful:

- the Private Proxy makes protected, package and private variables and methods accessible to developers to enhance their ability to create unit tests.

- the Pounder takes a method and reviews all of the possible combinations of input values and allows developers to invoke the method of interest using all of the predefined values for the parameter types.Changes in 2004.6.1:

- a String comparison that was being done incorrectly has been fixed.
- widening of method parameters is not supported. If an int is passed to a method that takes a long the call will now work correctly.
- invoking Methods defined in a parent class from a subclasses is now supported.
- it is now possible to pass a subclass to a method that is expecting the parent class and have the call work correctly.

Visit bwbUnit’s home page.

(from [url=http://www.javalobby.org/thread.jspa?forumID=17&threadID=13021]JavaLobby’s announcement[/url])

TestKit from ThoughtWorks is a testing framework for Mac OS X and the Objective-C language. Modeled after JUnit, it allows Mac OS X developers working in the Cocoa environment to write unit tests against Objective-C objects and features both command-line and graphical test running tools.

New in this release is an updated TestRunner, XCode Integration, and a mock objects API.

TestKit can be found at http://testkit.sourceforge.net.

More information about ThoughtWorks can be found at http://www.thoughtworks.com.

The Early Access Program has begun for JUnit Recipes: Practical Programmer Testing Methods by J. B. Rainsberger. Visit www.manning.com/rainsberger to begin downloading chapters in *.pdf format.Book description from Manning.com:

"JUnit Recipes is a cookbook for building better Java applications. It contains 150 recipes for better code, using JUnit as both a testing tool and a design tool. Each recipe is a short, self-contained article that answers your questions about how to use JUnit, from taking your first steps all the way to testing complex J2EE applications, including servlets, JSPs, EJBs and JMS components.

If you want to use JUnit on a new project, this book tells you how to design easy-to-test applications, helping you avoid the design pitfalls of many legacy applications.

If you need to start testing an existing application, you will find recipes dedicated to testing even the most difficult-to-test legacy components, like EJBs and JDBC code.

The book also discusses many extensions to the JUnit framework, including JUnit-addons, HTMLUnit, XMLUnit, ServletUnit, DBUnit, JUnitX and EasyMock, choosing each to do the job it does best.

These recipes have been collected over the past several years from a variety of Java and J2EE projects, showing you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and why. Test-Driven Design and Agile Software Development practitioners will recognize much of the book’s advice as following the principles of simple, flexible, supple design."

Pre-order this book at Amazon.

The AgileAlliance team is making available back issues of the Agile Times Newsletter.

The AgileAlliance is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the concepts of agile software development, and helping organizations adopt those concepts. Those concepts are outlined by the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.The current issue is only available to members.

Older issues are available to everyone, courtesy of the AgileAlliance, as PDF files.

Read Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4.

"This list is for general discussion of Fit. Appropriate topics include how to use Fit on your project, fixtures, and approaches to test-driven development using Fit."

See https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fit-users for further details.

(Via Brian Marick’s blog)

In order to address the issue voiced recently by several test-driven developers, Stefan Bodewig has just commited a change to Ant that will provide a new fork mode to launch a single Java Virtual Machine for the execution of all test classes in a JUnit task, speeding up the execution of large test suites.

No date has yet been set for this release.While test isolation recommends forking of a separate Virtual Machine, this mode can sometimes become expensive and slow. With the new "once" fork mode (<junit fork="true" forkmode="once"/>), Ant will make it possible to run specific JUnit tasks under a single VM.

Read Stefan’s blog entry and Kudo to Anton.
View the Enhancement request which prompted the update.
Visit Apache Ant.

Actimind, Inc. recently launched an "Open Mind in Action" campaign.

By the end of next month, the company will deliver a free version of actiWATE, a Java-based Web Application Testing Environment, aimed to make the test automation process easier and more cost-effective.

The company is looking for feedback from all interested users and organizations to tailor the product to your needs. In fact, this product will likely have the features you need, because it will be evolving in response to your requests and opinions.You can get more information about the product at http://www.actiwate.com/.

If you wish to participate, please register for a free copy.

InstallWatch records modifications made to your PC during the installation of software, hardware, or configuration changes.
http://www.epsilonsquared.com/

Dr. Laurie A. Williams, assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, has received a Career Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), for her research into the cost-effectiveness and quality-enhancing aspects of Test-Driven Development.Dr. Willams will receive $400,000 in funding over the next five years to support her research project — entitled "Test-Driven Development of Secure and Reliable Software Applications" — aiming to extend, validate and foster TDD as a software development practice to aid in the prevention of computer-related disasters.

Her proposal includes plans for an inter-university student competition to build excitement about developing secure and reliable software applications and a revised undergraduate software engineering textbook that will integrate security and reliability topics.

Dr. Williams has already co-authored several papers on TDD, including [url=http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/singlelink.php?cid=22&lid=124]Experience reports: testing and fault correction: Assessing test-driven development at IBM[/url], [url=http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/singlelink.php?cid=7&lid=32]An Initial Investigation of Test-Driven Development in Industry[/url], and Test-Driven Development as a Defect Reduction Practice.

Read the NCSU Press Release and the National Science Foundation Award Abstract.

"TDD: A Practical Guide" won the Jolt in the Technical
Book category this week at SDWest.

testdriven.com has just added Downloads to its menu of offerings. We intend to provide a reliable source for downloads of publicly available tools and documents discussed on our site.

Our first download is a treat from Jim Newkirk and Alexei Vorontsov: a sample chapter from their new book, Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET, which becomes available for purchase tomorrow.

Thanks for supporting our site by purchasing the book via our Amazon link.

The Silicon Valley Patterns group continues its track on Test-Driven Development with its 4th meeting tonight.

Russ Rufer, who organizes these regular meetings, plans to continue covering aspects of Test-Driven Development, and possibly engage a discussion on Saff’s continuous testing Eclipse plugin (beta version available here).

For details on this ongoing track, please refer to Russ’ original post.

realMethods vs. Wakesoft comparison lists JUnit tests as an asset that is delivered with the framework.

I hope to see more commercial software delivered with its test suite. [David Vydra]

Attend SD West 2004 by becoming a Conference Volunteer.Volunteering not only gives you the chance to meet and mingle with other developers, it allows you to attend conference sessions and events in exchange for your work. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.sdexpo.com/2004/west/volunteer/index.htm

JavaRanch is currently promoting the book Pragmatic Unit Testing, through a question contest to authors Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas.

The promotion ends on Friday, February 20th.

More information here.
Ask your questions [url=http://saloon.javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=68]here[/url].

The Developer Testing site has some great insights into deep issues of test-driven development.