InfoQ Homepage Software Testing Content on InfoQ
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The Ascendancy of Testers
New groups, conferences and workshops promote the traditionally neglected tester role, spotlighting the skills, tools, and principles needed to be an excellent tester on an Agile team. Historically, the role of a Tester or QA has often been post-hoc, taking place after software has been created. Bob Martin, one of the original Agile manifesto signatories, observed that this was not optimal.
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BDD: ATDD done well?
A new form of an old question has been asked in the Behavior Driven Development community: is BDD merely Acceptance Test Driven Development done well? While the community calls out the differences, Dan North makes a request to avoid focusing on them, calling TDD "amazing".
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Using the Cloud: Two Examples
Most of the discussion about cloud computing has focused on tools, providers, and security. While this focus is appropriate for an emerging technology, it becomes easier to recognize the value of cloud computing when you have actual application examples, or case studies. This month IBM announced two such applications: a development-and-test cloud, and an animation rendering cloud.
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Naresh Jain Discusses "Simple Design & Testing" And The Conference Dedicated To It
"Simplicity" is a core agile tenet, particularly when it comes to software design and testing. Since 2006, Naresh Jain has been running a worldwide conference, the Simple Design & Testing Conference, for practitioners to collectively push the boundaries on the topic. Naresh tells InfoQ what's going on behind this small, but well-known conference and why he is so passionate about the topic.
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Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests
Automated tests that are brittle and expensive to maintain have led to companies abandoning test automation initiatives, according to Dale Emery. In a newly published paper, Dale shares some practical ways to avoid common problems with test automation. He starts with some typical automation code and evolves in ways that make it more robust, and less expensive to maintain.
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Testing Heuristics - Thinking like a tester
James Bach and Elisabeth Hendrickson are two of the context driven testing community. James recently spoke at the STANZ conference and provided a guideline for approaching testing, and Elisabeth provides a heuristic checklist to help identify valuable testing activities.
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Functional Test Tools Workshop
A group of people interested in improving the state of the art in Automated Functional Test Tools gathered for an annual workshop the Sunday before Agile 2009. Among the topics covered: Lightening Talk demos of various tools, Porting Cucumber to .NET, Documenting existing functional test tool capabilities in a spreadsheet and the limits of Capture/Playback tools.
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StoryTeller and Executable Specifications - Interview with Jeremy D. Miller
Last week Jeremy D. Miller announced a preview release of his StoryTeller project: an open source .NET project for “Executable Specifications”. InfoQ sat down with Jeremy and asked him about what StoryTeller is, how it differs from other tools like Fit/FitNesse and Cucumber, and what the future looks like for the project.
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Categorizing Tests
What's the difference between unit tests, functional tests, system tests and integration tests? What about developer tests, story tests, and acceptance tests? There seems to be no consensus on naming and categorization of tests although they are central to many Agile development processes. A discussion on the TDD discussion group examines these categorizations and attempts to clear the waters.
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Debugging Tips for Selenium Test Failures
While Selenium has gained wide acceptance as a useful tool for automating browser-level tests, tracking down the cause of test failures can take significant time. Daniel Wellman has shared two of his best tricks to greatly reduce debugging time for failed Selenium tests.
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Kent Beck Suggests Skipping Testing for Very Short Term Projects
Kent Beck suggests that on very short term projects, when you're trying to figure out if there is a viable concept, you might do less (even no) automated testing to help get off the ground quickly. This goes against all of the conventional wisdom surrounding TDD.
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Dedicated Tester on an Agile Team
The need for dedicated testers on an Agile team has been long discussed and debated. In many Agile teams dedicated testers play a pivotal role where as in others developers double up as testers. A recent discussion on the Scrum Development group tries to revisit the need for having a dedicated tester on the team.
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Pex White-box Test Generator Updated
Microsoft Research has released a new version of Pex, an automated white-box testing library for .NET. Pex v0.11 brings support for Delegates as Parameters, a new Exception Tree View, Stubbed Events, and Recursive Stubs.
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Presentation: The Ethics of Error Prevention
No one wants programming errors. We have many tools to detect and correct errors in code. We also have a number of techniques we can use to prevent the introduction of errors. In this presentation, Michael Feathers t looksat error prevention while posing a number of interesting questions.
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Story Driven Development Recipes with Cucumber
Behavior Driven Development's (BDD) popularity cannot be denied. By simplifying DSL writing, Ruby allowed the birth of many BDD frameworks. Cucumber is one of them and can also be used to test Java, .NET and Flex and more.