Software Testing Magazine

Improving Developer-Tester Collaboration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

February 2, 2012 0

This video describes the six mechanisms in Visual Studio 2010 that enable more effective collaboration between developers and testers. These mechanisms include tools to create actionable bugs, debug historical events, and automate functional testing. Effective collaboration between developers and testers is paramount and can make the difference between shipping quality applications on time, or slipping because bugs are found late.

Testing First is Thinking First

February 2, 2012 0

“As we were saying, up-front testing really isn’t testing at all. It is really up-front design through the analysis of our tests. Can we take this testing even further? When XP came out and suggested doing unit tests, many of us realized that if we combined a series of unit tests together, we could get the equivalent of automated acceptance testing.”

Reducing Rails Testing Time

January 31, 2012 0

In those days where software tests are integrated in continuous integration cycles, it is a necessity that they run in a minimized amount of time. This article explains how through controlled memory usage, increased parallelism, transactional factory invocation, pragmatically judicious test refactoring and a few miscellaneous extras, it was possible to reduce the time needed to run the tests of a ruby on rails application in continuous-integration environments by a factor of ten.

Cucumber with JVM Improvements

January 31, 2012 0

Cucumber-JVM is a pure Java implementation of Cucumber, a software testing tool that support Behavior Driven Development with plain text specifications and unobtrusive automation in Ruby. Cucumber-JVM supports Clojure, Groovy, Java, JavaScript (Rhino interpreter), Python (Jython interpreter), Ruby (JRuby interpreter) and Scala. It is now written in a native Java-API, which compiles down to fast JVM bytecode. It enables many JVM capabilities and makes it even easier to integrate with your Java applications. Note from the Editor: we had the regret to realize after publication that there is no sound on this video. We should have tested this before ;o(

Seven Sins of Software Testing Automation

January 31, 2012 0

In this blog post, Adrian Smith discusses 7 pitfalls of automating software testing. The seven sins are over indulging on propriety testing tools, too lazy to setup CI server to execute tests, loving the UI so much that all tests are executed through the UI, jealously creating tests and not collaborating, frustration with fragile tests that break intermittently, thinking automated tests will replace all manual testing, too much automated testing not matched to defined system quality.

A Specifications-Based Mutation Engine for Testing Programs in C#

January 30, 2012 0

This article presents a simple and efficient engine which produces mutations of source code written in C# with helps testing it. The novelty of this engine is that it produces mutations that do not contradict with the specifications of the program. The latter are described by a set of pre- and post-conditions and invariants. The engine comprises two parts, a static analysis and syntactic verification component and a mutation generation component. Preliminary experiments showed that the proposed engine is more efficient than a simple mutations generator in terms of producing only valid mutations according to the specifications posed, thus saving time and effort during testing activities.

Python Unit Testing

January 26, 2012 0

This article presents a strategy for unit testing in Python, using a set of utility functions that converts to and from Roman numerals. The author discusses the benefits of a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach and propose a detailed testing process for all the cases of the functions.