About month ago, NetBeans did a big change. The change was kind of low-level, so if you are an ordinary user, you didn't probably notice. But if you are a developer on NetBeans platform, or somehow actively involved in developing NetBeans modules, or IDE itself, you are certainly interested in this new approach to testing. So what was the change about? We got rid of Xtest - the harness that was used by NetBeans to run automated tests for our modules. Reasons why we did this? Xtest was kind of complicated harness, lot of Ant scripts including other scripts. Poor integration with IDE. Quite complicated configuration (which mostly ends by "I'll copypaste config from somewhere where it's working and change this and that, and it will probably work").
Our new approach is called "simpletest". It means mostly simplification, easier test setup and simple usage of test distribution. Nice change is that you can you can run now qa-functional test directly from IDE in the same way you were used to run unit tests. Test results are now produced in both HTML and Junit XML format - yes, you can take a benefit from this and run your tests on Hudson, you get a nice charts, results history and some other stuff. In overall, qa-functional and unit tests are now more aligned.
For more information, see Simpletest wiki. I contains:
For more information, see Simpletest wiki. I contains:
- Migration guide - howto change your tests to be "simpletest compliant"
- New properties for running tests from Binary test distribution
- How to setup test configurations
- Discussion
Doing functional testing in a platform-based application was certainly possible with XTest, but quite complicated to use for a non-IDE application. With Simpletests, it's now built in to the build scripts and should "just work" with no special configuration needed. Making testing easier means that developers are more likely to do it, so this will benefit end users as well as development teams.
BTW, your link to the "Simpletests wiki" just points back to this blog entry. I think you meant to point here http://wiki.netbeans.org/FitnessTestsWithoutX
I want to Jesse Glick, Jaroslav Tulach, Lukas Hasik, Marian Mirilovic, Shura and everyone else involved with this change for making it happen! And thanks to Jiri Skrivanek for all his hard work and support on XTest.
Posted by Tom Wheeler on July 31, 2008 at 07:43 PM CEST #
Yes, thanks, link is now OK.
Great to hear that platform development people like this change, thanks.
Posted by TM on August 01, 2008 at 09:01 AM CEST #
I would like to mention Tomas Musil, he was the guy in QE taking care of all new problems and solve them on the fly by himself or with the help of Jarda & Jesse. Thanks.
Posted by Marian on August 04, 2008 at 08:59 AM CEST #
Thanks to Tomas Musil as well!
Posted by Tom Wheeler on August 11, 2008 at 09:16 PM CEST #