Improving on Unit Tests with Sonar

Sonar enables to collect, analyze and report metrics on source code. Sonar not only offers consolidated reporting on and across projects throughout time, but it becomes the central place to manage code quality. This screencast shows how to use Sonar to manage unit tests by checking their results. When you are done, you can verify that components are properly covered.

Improving on unit tests from Sonar Team on Vimeo.

Golden rules for software testing

Read these simple golden rules for software testing. They are based on my testing experiences.

Its all about finding the bug as early as possible:

• Start the software testing process by analysing requirements long before development.

Make sure you have these 3 software testing levels

• Integration testing (performed by IT)
• System testing (performed by professional testers)
• Acceptance testing (performed by business users)

Don’t expect too much of automated testing:

• First let me state this : automated testing can be extremely useful and can be a real time saver. But it can also turn out to be a very expensive and invalid solution.

Deal with resistance:

• If you like to be instant popular, don’t become a software tester ! You 'll find out that you are going to meet a great deal of resistance... It is very likely that you will end up being the sole defender of quality at a certain point. Other participants in the project will be tempted to go for the deadline, whatever the quality of the application is.

• You should deal with this by reporting facts and figures in stead of opinions. It might take a while before your work colleagues appreciate the great job you're doing !

Do regression testing every new release

• Okay, you've tested your new development successfully. Great. But do the features of the application that you didn't change still work ? You really should test this before going live.

Let real users test with real data

• This one is obvious but who does it ?
• You cannot beat real data.

Give defects a test severity status :

• Critical (must have, no work around)
• High (must have, work around possible)
• Medium (not business critical, but wanted)
• Low (nice to have)

Let product owners deceide if a defect is to be fixed based on business priority:

• A bit obvious, but I've seen testers make this decision and assign business statuses
• Actively use these statuses for reporting and follow up !

This might be the most difficult goal to achieve:

• You should talk about exit and entry criteria with IT. When is software good enough to deliver to a test team ? Think about server errors, certain level of IT testing achieved, when and how to build...

• Same goes for business. What quality do they expect ? Who is going to make decisions on when to go live ? Make sure it is not you. Your role should be advisory.

Focus on the software testing process, not on the tools:

• There 's a lot of talking about test management software. Sure, they can be very helpful indeed. These tools probably will take a lot of work out of your hands... But don't forget : it 's you who has to define the testing process. No tool is going to do that for you ! Think thoroughly about how you 're going to organise your testing. You can be very successful by using basic tools like MS Excel.

From http://www.testertroubles.com/2009/05/golden-rules-for-software-testing.html

FitNesse: Slim Data Types

A tutorial on the data types in Slim tables.



Slim Data Types from unclebob on Vimeo.

Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

TDD: Code without Fear

From http://www.testingtv.com/2009/08/31/tdd-code-without-fear/

Pillar Technology Announces Automated JUnit Test Solution for Java Code

Pillar Technology has addressed the lack of JUnit test coverage in legacy Java J2EE applications and solved the extreme hassle of manually written JUnit tests. Pillar announces Verdé, a tool that automates the code quality analysis and characterization testing of all Java J2EE applications, delivering JUnit tests dynamically at run time.

The velocity of development teams using test-driven software development techniques improve by a significant margin when leveraging the automated capability of Verdé. Clients using the Verdé tool report a 70 percent reduction in the cost of manually produced JUnit code.

"Leveraging Verdé allows users to create a safety harness for users' existing applications,” said Gary Gentry, CEO of Pillar Technology. "Imagine the ability to make significant modifications to your code base with the comfort of knowing that your existing functionality isn't at risk.” Verdé measures and reports: Code Quality, Code Testability and Test Coverage (Cyclomatic Complexity, Injectability/Mockability). Verdé also provides a detailed actionable report with specific recommendations allowing a developer to improve the testability of the code. For more information, go to: http://pillartechnology.com/index.php/verde

From http://www.devagile.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=426

PowerMock

http://www.testingtv.com/2009/08/24/powermock/

PowerMock can be used to test code normally regarded as untestable! Have you ever heard anyone say that you should never use static or final methods in your code because it makes them impossible to test? Have you ever changed a method from private to protected for the sake of testability? What about avoiding “new”? Think again! PowerMock lets you mock static methods, remove static initializers, allow mocking without dependency injection and much much more. And it works just as well for J2EE as J2ME! This presentation will give the audience a good understanding on how to easily unit-test your code without the limitations of the common mock frameworks such as EasyMock and JMock.

Converting Fit to Slim

Une vidéo de 7 minutes qui montre comment convertir un test FIT en SLIM.