I Want a Platypus Too
2008-05-02 – 10:49Just read Elisabeth Hendrickson’s posts on next-generation functional testing tools, and thought the links (her articles, plus tools she finds intriguing) would be interesting to readers of this blog. Long story short, I’m trying to figure out whether DrProject should provide support for testing, and if so, what kind and at what level—no other portal does, so I can’t imitate prior art.
- Agile-Friendly Test Automation Tools/Frameworks
- Functional Test Tools: The Next Generation (1, 2)
- FitNesse
- ZiBreve
- Green Pepper Software
- StoryTestIQ (self-described as a mashup of Selenium and FitNesse)
- Concordion (”…lets you turn a plain English description of a requirement into an automated test…”)
5 Responses to “I Want a Platypus Too”
Adding support for testing mainly means making your system testable. It is surprisingly easy when you think about it before the implementation but hard to do after the fact. For web systems it is often enough to add clear and non-changing identifiers for all your widgets (including labels). I recommend reading Bret Pettichord’s excellent paper Design for Testability for more information. You can get it from http://www.io.com/%7Ewazmo/papers/design_for_testability_PNSQC.pdf
By Pekka Laukkanen on May 2, 2008
@Pekka: I agree systems should be designed for testability; I was wondering what tools like DrProject can provide to help with the actual testing.
By Greg Wilson on May 2, 2008
Since you probably have generic interfaces (web, database, etc.) you should be able to use existing open source test tools. If your system is testable you shouldn’t need much more.
By Pekka Laukkanen on May 2, 2008
@Pekka: I think there’s a misunderstanding: I’m not trying to test DrProject itself, I’m trying to provide tools in DrProject that will help people with the testing of whatever application(s) they’re using DrProject to help develop.
By Greg Wilson on May 2, 2008
Testing (beyond Unit Testing) really goes hand in hand with deployment. To test a system it needs to be running in reasonably realistic environment.
However that means testing is tied to your deployment platform. If you’re willing to take the hit the system can very tight like Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.
But then you have moved away from the ‘lowest common denominator’ approach that is hallmark of good software.
Something that might hit a sweet spot (an idea I tried implementing for TRAC, but then the sun came out) is a unified logging system. Just like TRAC supports very handy wiki links to parts of your code. I part-build a system that allows links back from log files (presented inside TRAC’s wiki system) back to the code that scribed them.
…everyone needs logging!
By Jan on May 6, 2008