Writing and keeping up to date documentation in software development projects has always been a problem. In this blog post, Jim Bird discusses the idea of using automated tests to document a software system. He also ask the questions: what do tests document? who will find this documentation useful?
Populating systems under test with data is often done by cleaning and inserting data directly into databases using SQL scripts. Whilst this technique is simple, it can have several drawbacks for automated tests.
Answering an article saying that you cannot use exploratory testing in Agile, Huib Schoots tries to explain what exploratory testing is and why it is suitable to perform this activity in an Agile context.
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD9 and Acceptance Testing are heavily intertwined and in many aspects are one and the same. Both focus on starting at the outer layers of your application by concentrating on what matter to users; behavior.
Pex is a Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools that help Unit Testing .NET applications. Pex automatically generates test suites with high code coverage. Right from the Visual Studio code editor, Pex finds interesting input-output values of your methods, which you can save as a small test suite with high code coverage. Microsoft Code Digger is a Visual Studio 2012 that analyzes possible execution paths through your .NET code. The result is a table where each row shows a unique behavior of your code. The table helps you understand the behavior of the code, and it may also uncover hidden bugs.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is an approach used in software testing to identify the root causes of defects or problems and address them instead of treating the symptoms. It’s a process that grew out of accident investigations to become a standard feature of hardware engineering. If something is broken, instead of just fixing it at the point of discovery, let’s investigate and try to fix the underlying cause at the point of origin. This principle is applicable for software development and software testing, so much so, that it could have been developed to deal with software defects.
Unit Tests are ultimately a way to ensure quality by catching defined errors cases early. There exist many handy and excellent tools for unit testing, and even methodologies like Test Driven Design based around unit tests. As a result of this, developers tend to use unit tests “for everything”, and consequently use the term too broadly.
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