Thursday morning started off with John Paul Ashenfelter's Testing CF Applications.

First he covered some of the reasons why we want to test our apps:

• We want to verify the software works correctly
• We want to validate the reliability and stability of the software
• We want to ensure the software solves the problems it was meant to solve
• We want to make sure users can use the software

Also, one bad release can spoil people's perceptions of your application.

He states that we should test all the time

Some of the types of testing we should do:

• application - functional testing
• code - unit testing
• system - load testing
• users - acceptance testing

Test cases - single step (or small steps) with a single outcome. Also, we need at least one test per requirement / test case

He demonstrated Selenium, a tool to automate testing of your web application. It is open source, can run in a browser (Firefox), at a command line, or on the server.

He spoke about scenario tests, which are based on a story.

He had a demo of DbUnit, which allows you to put your database into a known state between tests. Unit tests - the developer writes a test to verify an extermely specific area (unit) of functionality (code) behaves as expected. One unit test is not sufficient. Unit tests should handle good data, bad data, and edge cases.

All of the test cases can be combined to perform a test suite. The test suite tests the entire application.

Two books he recommended - Practices Of An Agile Developer and My Job Went To India And All I Got Was This Lousy Book

Posted by jhusum - 10:43 AM - General - Comments - Link to this entry