Software Testing Magazine

Fake DbContext Testing

February 15, 2012 0

Rowan Miller shows how to replace a DbContext based data access layer with an in-memory fake for unit testing in this blog post. He builds an interface that represents the context and then builds an in-memory fake of that context for use in our unit tests. He uses an MVC controller but the same approach can be used with any component that needs to interact with an EF based context, including repositories. The key benefits of this approach are stable and robust tests that execute quickly and exercise a single component, making failures easy to isolate.

Transition to Agile Testing

February 14, 2012 1

This article discusses the traditional software testing aspects that should be changed before adopting Agile practices. Testing teams face a significant impediment when they have to unlearn the traditional practices.

Test-Driven Development for Command-line Applications

February 13, 2012 0

How do you do Test-Driven Development (TDD) with command-line tools? How does one make a failing test for a missing command-line option? This video answers these questions with some real-world examples.

Unit Testing Google App Engine

February 13, 2012 0

This blog post provides a detail process on how to create and run unit tests for Google App Engine applications. The author shows how to write the tests using the standard python unittest module and execute them with gaeunit, a web based test runner. He reminds us that it is easier to write unit tests during design rather than afterwards. We should also keep the tests high level so that further detailed modifications will not break the tests. A short video summarizing Google App Engine unit testing is available at the end.

Guidelines for Java Testable Design

February 13, 2012 3

Issues with testability in Java boil down to our inability to write tests or the excess trouble we have to go through to get it done. In this article, based on chapter 7 of the book “Effective Unit Testing – A guide for Java developers”, Lasse Koskela shares a set of dos and don’ts for testable design. In the tips provided, he recommends to avoid complex private methods, static methods, logic in constructors and to favor composition over inheritance.

Performance Analysis of REST/HTTP Services with JMeter and Yourkit

February 10, 2012 0

Running stress- or load-tests of asynchronous REST/HTTP services with JMeter is only the first step in performance improvement. If the applications have problems when load increases, you need to find where the issues are. You can spend a lot of time to examine the code base before – if ever – finding the cause of the performance problem. This blog post provides an introduction on how to record and examine telemetry performance measurements with Yourkit3 after running JMeter tests.

Do Unit Tests FIRST

February 9, 2012 0

Unit tests are useful and effective if you remember to make them FIRST. FIRST is an acronym for Fast, Isolated, Repeatable, Self-Verifying and Timely. Each of this points is discussed in the article with examples. The most important thing about unit tests is that they be useful and effective for your programming team. The FIRST mnemonic is a simple mechanism to guide you there.