GTAC 2008 - Day 2

Day 2 of GTAC 2008 has been quite interesting. The talks that have interested me were the talk on Context Driven Testing.

This talk, by Pete Schneider of F5, dealt with what context that tests were being created. It dealt with a common issue that testers and deverlopers have and most of them ignore. It was really interesting in seeing that they were 11 different applications that testers had created and were maintaining but there was a lot of overlap. They found that creating tests in the right context and with the right owners of tests has dramatically made a difference in getting their application tested.

The main thing that I took away from it is; When creating a testing framework ask yourself the following questions

• Who is going to write the framework
• Who is going to build and maintain it
• How are you going to use it
• How long will the tests live

The next talk that was really interesting was on Automated Model-based testing by Atif Memon and Oluwaseun Akinmade of University of Maryland. It was a really good talk on creating models for test cases, similar to my Graphical Test Strategy post from the beginning of the year. The difference between my post and this talk was the model is created on the fly by the test code that then builds a WebDriver test case. There is one draw back that I noticed and I know I wasn't the only one. This modelling works well on websites that don't have AJAX. Its a big draw back and they did mention that they are working to get it sorted.

Its value for Desktop applications is really good and I would definitely recommend it. It is able to recreate states for the test and make sure that works well and has good coverage.


The next talk was on the value of unit tests by Christopher Semturs. He was advocating the use of Mocks in your unit tests so that you can get better granularity of your tests. This is something that really interests me because I like making my tests fast because if a test is fast a developer is more likely to run the tests. He was advocating the idea of small,medium and large tests. Its an idea from some Google guys where you do unit tests in isolation and then do pair-wise integration tests. This means that you drop your large end to end tests number dramatically.


GTAC 2008 has been really cool with a lot of clever people talking about different aspects of testing and describing what is needed from testing in the future. Its definitely been worth the jetlag!

GTAC 2008 - Day 1

Day one of GTAC has been really cool. There have been a number of really good talks. I will put links to the YouTube videos when I know them.

James Whittaker's opening talk was a really good start to the day. One of the main things he talked about was the visualization of testing for the future. He discussed the way that people can visualise when there are new code differences. This can be very useful in making sure that testers can see what is new and what should be concentrated on. I am always keen on using visual ways to test and make sure that the quality is high.

The next talk that caught my attention was "Advances in Automated Software Technologies". This talk discussed the idea of Autonomous Computing in software testing and the idea that you can auto generate test cases against APIs. It is an interesting idea but the way that it was put across was that you can only use this on items where the requirements are rock solid. This is not really something that can be applied to Agile developments.

The talk on Groovy was really good. I have started playing with Groovy when trying to automate SOA testing using SoapUI. Its a nice language that can be strong typed or weak typed at the same time and really useful for scripting. Since I haven't played with it a lot I did learn a lot like you can hook into all languages that use the JVM.

The next talk that really interested me was the last talk of the day. It was on the testability of code. It was looking to see how easy is it to test and making tests simpler. This is important because it means that your tests become manageable and supportable. Vishal Chowdhary was advocating SOCK:

• Simplicity of your code
• Observe how things work and interact
  
• Control of your tests
• Knowledge of what it should be done
  

He was also saying that we need to make sure that we don't overdesign software because this can add extra complexity when there doesn't need to be!

The talks have been very good and have stimulated some ideas that I want to take back to work! I am now off to the Google Seattle office for a tour the lightning talks.

.Net Gem - How to Unit Test Internal Methods

I have recently started redoing unit tests for bit of code at work and came across a internal methods and classes that needed to be tested.

This posed a question of: how do I access the internal methods and classes to test them properly from an external assembly?

I found this little gem that a lot of the developers where I work had not heard of, this doesn't mean that its not common knowledge but thought I would share it a little more.

I have put a scenario below of how it might work.

Being a good TDD developer you decide that you want to write your unit tests for an internal method. You create your .Net Class Library structure so you know what your tests need to call to do your asserts. It may looks something like the image below.

So now you want to start writing your tests and notice that your intellisense is not bringing up your internal class. So what do you do next?

Open the AssemblyInfo.cs file that is in your Properties folder. Add the line [assembly:InternalsVisibleTo("Unit.Tests")] somewhere near the top.

Now your Internal Classes and methods are only visible to Unit.Tests assembly.

Your start writing your unit tests and intellisense should be playing Mr. Nice Guy and we should see something like below.

I hope that it has been useful!