Xzajo's Weblog

Thursday May 11, 2006

Test Patterns In Java™ Technology Development on Java One

Are you going on Java One? Don't forget on Test Patterns In Java™ Technology Development session.

• Tuesday , 05/16/2006, 09:30 PM - 10:20 PM BOF-0220

Three architects of NetBeans (Jesse Glick, Jaroslav Tulach, Milos Kleint) will be talking about their experiences with test driven development. To tell you truth, these guys save me a lot of time in my work. Yes, they are careful and write tests whether it is possible. Almost no regression is in their code. I than can cover more features as QA representative.

I tell you a success story with test driven development. Jaroslav Tulach is one of the NetBeans fathers. I remember times when he started to write tests. He wrote API of NetBeans. Many developers dependent on his code. Before four years every one in NetBeans were afraid of his commits. A small change in code on which depends many developers caused the break of NetBeans build. But now he write also a lot of code. But the code is already tested with unit tests. And the code is really stable. Every one writes code with mistake. With test the code contains a little count of bugs and we are able to catch regressions earlier with daily tests runs.

I learn from Jaroslav's and Jesse's code a lot of useful testing pattern. Therefore I recommend the session.

Session Abstract

Testing is an important part of software development. Effective testing is a key factor in reducing total cost of maintenance of any application over its lifetime. It reduces the cost and time of development and can increase savings on quality assurance. Knowing when to invest in better design, in postdevelopment quality assurance, in manual tests, or in automatic testing forms a basic difference between successful and unsuccessful software projects in these tough and competitive days.

This presentation starts with general motivation and presents automatic tests as a form of functional specification. It then quickly delves deep down into hard-core JUnit test examples showing various forms of regression tests verifying algorithm complexity, memory management, data structure sizes, deadlocks, race condition behavior and tests randomly generating new test cases, simulating user clicks in the UI, API signature tests, and so on.

Attendees should know what tests are and that tests are an important and useful part of software development. The presentation demonstrates practical usage of a test framework. You learn techniques, tips, and tricks for testing various aspects of real-world Java™ Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) applications. The session also gives examples of the savings and improvements that were achieved by increased usage of extensive automatic testing in the development of the NetBeans™ IDE and platform.