Acceptance-Test Driven Development – Bring Developers and Testers Together

Published March 3rd, 2010 Under Software Testing, TDD | Leave a Comment

Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) are powerful techniques, helping developers write better designed, more maintainable and more reliable code, and stay focused on the real user requirements. But how does the rest of the team fit in to the picture? In this talk, John Smart, creator of the Java Power Tools Bootcamp, looks at how BDD techniques, and tools such as easyb and FitNesse, can also act as drivers for the overall development process, and also as communication tools, giving testers and end-users clear and unambiguous feedback on what is being developed and where it is at in terms of delivery and schedule.

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-testing/john-smart-acceptance-test-driven-development

Listening to Test Smells

Published February 18th, 2010 Under Software Testing, TDD | Leave a Comment

This talk is about how to use the stresses of writing unit tests to improve your code. If I’m having trouble writing tests, it’s often because the design of my target code can be improved. The trick is to listen to the tests and let them drive my development — that’s a hint as to why it’s called Test-Driven Development. As a developer, you can sensitise yourself to find the rough edges in your tests and use them for rapid feedback about how to improved the design of your code. In this talk, I will work through examples of “smelly” tests, showing how they highlight design flaws and suggest improvements.

Watch this video on JavaZone (click on “Presentation”)

Extending Continuous Integration

Published February 16th, 2010 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment

The talk shows how we can implement a rigorous, yet agile process. It is based around our experiences of putting the good idea of continuous integration and other agile methods into life and using this as the basis not just for the technical process, but for the whole improvement program for our organization. We have expanded our process to cover simulated production as a part of the testing effort. This way, we can guarantee that the actual delivery day will be uneventful. The audience will come away from the talk with a good idea on how to improve their build process. The talk will cover both practical aspects, architectural changes that improves continuous integration, and what change you need to make in your organization to streamline the value chain from a code change to production readiness.

Watch this video on JavaZone (click on “Presentation”)

Additional resource: Continuous Integration Tools Directory

Easy and Maintainable Enterprise Testing with Unitils

Published February 10th, 2010 Under Agile, Software Testing | Leave a Comment

Unit testing has become a mainstream task. Most developers do it. Most project leaders and architects expect their team to write tests. However, practice has taught us that a lot of teams write few tests, or spend too much time writing and maintaining them. Different development teams make common mistakes, run into similar issues and find their own solutions for them. This costs a lot of valuable time. Unitils started in 2005 and has emerged from concrete experience and lessons learned, with the ultimate goal of making unit testing easy, effective and maintainable. Unitils offers a lot of support in testing the database layer: automatic maintenance of test databases, automatic post-processing of the database to make it more test-friendly, loading test data using DbUnit and verifying the contents of the database after execution of a test. Unitils provides specific support for testing with JPA or hibernate, and offers integration with spring. It makes abstraction of the testing framework that is used for executing the tests, making it useable with JUnit3, JUnit4 or TestNG. But Unitils is not limited to persistence layer testing only: The reflection assert utility is a very useful alternative to the classic assertEquals method with a range of leniency options. Unitils also provides superior support for dynamic mock objects, offering a simple syntax for specifying method behavior and verifying expectations. This talk will present the different features of Unitils using simple, concrete examples.

Watch this video on JavaZone (click on “Presentation”)

Jason van Zyl on the Future of Maven: Maven 3

Published December 28th, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Jason recently talked about Maven 3 at the Maven Meetup on March 19, 2009. Here is his entire presentation. In it, Jason discusses plans for Maven 3: support for incremental builds, changes to Plexus, better multi-language support, a queryable lifecycle, changes to the Plugin API, extensible reporting, a refactored plugin manager, project builder, and a new subsystem for interacting with repositories. You’ll hear Jason discuss plans to make Maven 3 more pluggable and to prepare for a Maven that can integrate with various repository formats. Jason also talks about changing the report generation subsystem to be more focused on report generation and integration with tools such as Sonar and Hudson.

Slides of the presentation

Improving on Unit Tests with Sonar

Published September 29th, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

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.

Making Code More Testable – Breaking Static Dependencies

Published September 29th, 2009 Under Agile, TDD | Leave a Comment

This screencast tries to cover how the static dependencies in constructor could be broken.

Watch this screencast on isagoksu.com

News from the Gradle Build System

Published September 28th, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Gradle is a flexible general purpose build system with a build-by-convention framework a la Maven on top. It uses Apache Ivy under the hood for its dependency management. Its build scripts are written in Groovy. We start with a simple hello world build and then work with a plain Java and a Java Web project. From there we go to a more complex multi-project build. During those live sessions we will discuss most of the major Gradle features. We will compare those features with what you can and can not do with Ant or Maven. We will use the latest Gradle snapshot with some very exciting new functionality.

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/news-from-the-gradle-build-system

PowerMock

Published August 24th, 2009 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment

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.

Getting Serious About Build Automation: Using Maven in the Real World

Published July 29th, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Maven 2 is becoming increasingly popular in larger organizations looking to standardize and industrialize their build processes as well as in smaller shops simply trying to get more out of their builds. This session, for developers wanting to learn about Maven and Maven users wanting to get more out of their build tool, covers the main features and benefits of Maven and then looks at some of the more advanced uses of Maven in the real world, including complex transitive dependency management, dependency conflicts, multimodule projects, and integration with other build systems. It also looks at how the m2eclipse plug-in can be used to improve the Maven user experience and how to use the Nexus repository manager with the Maven release process to publish your APIs within your organization.

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/getting-serious-about-build-automation-using-maven-in-the-real-world

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