InfoQ

News

Autotest - a hidden tool gem

Posted by Werner Schuster on Dec 12, 2007

Community
Ruby
Topics
Agile Techniques ,
Programming ,
Unit Testing
Tags
IDEs ,
ZenTest ,
Testing ,
Automation
One of the secrets of the Ruby community is why many developers prefer  text editors over IDEs. One reason is the group of tools - written in Ruby - that help to automate a lot of the tedium of coding. Some of these tools were recently featured in a poll on Pat Eyler's blog

One of these tools is Autotest, part of the Zentest package. The installation is simple:
gem install zentest 
While Zentest helps you write unit tests and synchronize your code with them, Autotest does exactly one thing: once started, it will re-run the tests whenever a file is saved. It's clever about it and only runs the tests that are deal with code in the saved files.

Eric Hodel, the creator of Autotest, explains his mode of work that led him to write Autotest:
Before I wrote autotest I was making fine-grained saves that were syntactically correct. I wrote autotest to automate the running of tests so I wouldn't have to choose which tests to run. My changes were so small that I spent an annoying fraction of my time editing my command line.
This also mentions another benefit of running the tests: the code gets loaded and checked at every save. Compare this to modern Java IDEs, that run a big set of static analyzers such as syntax and semantic checkers over code, either incrementally or when a save happens. A similar level of automated checking is achieved with Autotest, while still leaving developers in their preferred editor.

A plugin interface also allows to extend Autotest. This is as simple as creating a ".autotest" file in the project root. In this, either require existing plugins, or write some custom handlers for various hooks:
Autotest.add_hook :red { |autotest|   p "Failures!" } 
The first parameter is the name of the hook this hooks into - in this case a test failure. This code will simply print out "Failures!" if the tests didn't pass. This also allows to invoke other tools, depending on the outcome of the tests or simply at every save. Plugins for integration with Emacs or acoustic feedback are available.

Have you heard of Autotest before? Are you considering to use it?

No comments

Watch Thread Reply

Educational Content

Brian Marick on 4 Challenges and 5 Guiding Values of Agile Software Development

Brian Marick takes us through a quick tour of the most important values and challenges to adopting Agile successfully (they aren't the typical challenges and values we hear in the community).

Are You a Software Architect?

The line between development and architecture is tricky. Does it exist at all? Is an ivory tower actually needed? There's a balance in the middle, but how do you move from developer to architect?

Agile – A Way of Life and Pragmatic Use of Authority

The word 'authority' sometimes produces an allergic response in hard-line agilists. Freedom and authority – both are bad if misused and both are good if used in right spirit for a noble cause.

Getting Started with Grails, Second Edition

"Getting Started with Grails" brings you up to speed on this modern web framework. Companies as varied as LinkedIn, Wired, and Taco Bell are all using Grails. Are you ready to get started as well?

Using ITIL V3 as a Foundation for SOA Governance

Those familiar with only ITIL V2 often scoff at the thought that ITIL could serve as a governance framework for SOA. With ITIL V3, the focus of the framework shifted towards service-orientation.

Adrian Colyer on AspectJ, tc Server and dm Server

SpringSource CTO Adrian Colyer discusses AspectJ, SpringSource's dm Server and tc Server products, OSGi and Scrum.

Adam Wiggins on Heroku

Heroku's Adam Wiggins talks about Rails, Background Jobs, Add-Ons, Ruby, and how Heroku manages to work around Ruby's inefficiencies using Erlang and other languages.

SOA as an Architectural Pattern: Best Practices in Software Architecture

For Grady Booch the foundation of a good architecture is patterns, SOA being just one of many patterns. In this Second Life presentation, Booch attempts to bring more clarity on what architecture is.