Software Testing Magazine

Oracles in Software Testing

October 18, 2012 0

In this article, Cem Kaner discusses the usage of oracles when teaching software testing. In software testing, an oracle is the expected result of the test. It is an heuristic that should help you decide if the program passed your test. He ask the question: “If you don’t have authoritative oracles (“authoritative” = an oracle that is always correct), then how can you test? How can you specify a test in a way that a junior tester or a computer can run the test and correctly tell you whether the program passed it?”

Software Testing with Hermetic Servers

October 16, 2012 0

This post by Chaitali Narla and Diego Salas on the Google Testing blog introduces the concept of hermetic servers in software testing. In a situation where the System Under Test (SUT) is composed of multiple servers, the notion of hermetic servers will help to solve the challenges of writing a fast and reliable end-to-end tests, avoiding network access. The hermetic server could be defined as a “server in a box”. Thus your testing could all be started on a single machine, physical or virtual, without the need for a network connection.

How Real Tests Lead to Real Progress

October 11, 2012 0

Unit tests are programmer’s best friend, but relying on them exclusively gives an illusion of overall system integrity. At some level, we need to verify how our components integrate and ensure unexpected behavior does not creep in when we shift the application into the target runtime. It all amounts to whether your application is providing the end user what he or she is really needs (tire swing) instead of what anyone thinks they need. How can we save our users from frustration, keep the fail whale at bay and communicate with stakeholders that the requirements are being met?

Improving Java Unit Tests Speed

October 10, 2012 0

This article by Lasse Koskela, provides several tips on how to improve the speed of your Java unit tests. The strategy to improve the speed up test code is to find slow things and either make them run faster or not run them at all.

Unit testing databases with DBUnit, Spring and TestNG

October 9, 2012 1

In this blog post, Nicolas Frankel explains how to perform unit testing on a database using DBUnit, Spring and TestNG. DbUnit is a JUnit extension for database-driven projects that, among other things, puts your database into a known state between test runs. This is an excellent tool to avoid the issues that can occur when one test case corrupts the database and causes subsequent tests to fail. DbUnit has also the ability to export and import your database data to and from XML datasets.

The Negative Side of Mocking Tools

October 4, 2012 0

In this article, Brett Schuchert discusses how modern mocking tools affects positively our ability to work with legacy code and the possible negative implications of using mocking tools. These tools allow us to perform unit testing without actually changing the underlying code. He starts with a discussion about the challenges of unit testing and how mocking tools help to solve them; at least on the surface.

Test-Driven Development with PHPUnit

September 27, 2012 0

PHPUnit is a unit testing software framework for PHP. It provides both a framework that makes writing unit tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyze their results. This video shows you how to build a relatively simple class, using TDD techniques. It also discusses various PHPUnit methods and explains how to create mock objects.