Software Testing Articles, Blog Posts, Books, Podcasts and Quotes
Software tests never run fast enough. To improve this performance, this article presents a process called DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control). It shows how to apply this approach with Cucumber, an open source Behavior Driven Development tool. Cucumber lets you describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as requirements documentation and source of automated acceptance tests.
Practical Unit Testing with TestNG and Mockito is a book that is intended especially for those who would like to start unit testing their code, but are unsure about how to get started and what to focus on. It presents the unit testing domain with examples in the Java language using the TestNG and Mockito open source tools.
The increased complexity of browser-executed code has increased the need to write unit test cases for JavaScript code. This article describes some of the most common tools for unit testing JavaScript: QUnit, YUI Test and JSTestDriver. The learning curve can be steep if you do not typically write tests for client-side scripting and testing the user interface could require adjustments in your thought process. This article provides code examples that will walk you through sample test cases.
In this blog post, Mark Barne shares some useful tips and techniques to challenge those attempting to adopt acceptance test driven development within a corporate environment. Amongst the tips that I liked the best I will mention “Don’t clean up after tests”. Leaving the data created by the test can help immensely when issues are found. “Create unique contexts for each test”. To prevent tests stepping on each other’s toes if they are run in parallel, create a unique context for the test. “Don’t write the test at all.” If the story doesn’t have much value, or the the systems you are using are not in your control and are not test friendly then stop just short of automating it.
In this blog post, Rob Stevenson-Leggett gives a detail presentation on how to start some simple Javascript unit tests using QUnit as the test framework and Sinon.js as a mocking framework. QUnit is a JavaScript test suite used by the jQuery project to test its code and plugins but is capable of testing any generic JavaScript code and even capable of testing JavaScript code on the server-side. Sinon.JS is a standalone test spies, stubs and mocks for JavaScript. It has no dependencies and works with any unit testing framework.
Certification is now a mainstream feature of software tester careers. Even if the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) seems to be the main certification body in the software testing world with a representation in more than 70 countries, other software testing organizations offers both a community for sharing knowledge and opportunities to be a certified software tester.
Unit testing JavaScript applications can seem difficult. Issues arise with JavaScript scope, asynchronous XHR requests, DOM manipulation, and all the different browsers and platforms. Sometimes, JavaScript unit testing seems unreliable, brittle, or take more time and effort than it’s worth. The good news is that dozens of JavaScript test frameworks, libraries, and test runners help solve the problems. These make implementing unit tests for your JavaScript applications quick, reliable, and easy to maintain.
