Contents tagged with TDD
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WatinN to automate browser and test sophisticated ASP.NET AJAX sites
WatiN is a great .NET library for writing automated browser based tests that uses real browser to go to websites, perform actions and check for browser output. Combined with a unit test library like xUnit, you can use WatiN to perform automated regression tests on your websites and save many hours of manual testing every release. Moreover, WatiN can be used to stress test Javascripts on the page as it can push the browser to perform operations repeatedly and measure how long it takes for Javascripts to run. Thus you can test your Javascripts for performance, rendering speed of your website and ensure the overall presentation is fast and smooth for users.
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User story is worthless, Behavior is what we need
User Story is suitable for describing what user needs but not what user does and how system reacts to user actions within different contexts. It basically gives product team a way to quantify their output and let their boss know that they are doing their job. As a developer, you can’t write code from user stories because you have no clue on what what is the sequence of user actions and system reactions, what are the validations, what APIs to call and so on. As a QA, you can’t test the software from user stories because it does not capture the context, the sequence of events, all possible system reactions. User stories add little value to dev lifecycle. It only helps product team understand how much work they have to do eventually and it helps finance team get a view on how much money people are talking about. But to UI designers, solution designers, developers, they are nothing but blobs of highly imprecise statements that leave room for hundreds of questions to be answered. The absence of “Context” and “Cause and Effect”, and the imprecise way of saying “As a...I want... so that...” leaves room for so many misinterpretations that there’s no way development team can produce software from just user stories without spending significant time all over again analysing the user stories. Software, and the universe eventually, is all about Cause and Effect. The Cause and Effect is not described in a user story.
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Finally! Entity Framework working in fully disconnected N-tier web app
Entity Framework was supposed to solve the problem of Linq to SQL, which requires endless hacks to make it work in n-tier world. Not only did Entity Framework solve none of the L2S problems, but also it made it even more difficult to use and hack it for n-tier scenarios. It’s somehow half way between a fully disconnected ORM and a fully connected ORM like Linq to SQL. Some useful features of Linq to SQL are gone – like automatic deferred loading. If you try to do simple select with join, insert, update, delete in a disconnected architecture, you will realize not only you need to make fundamental changes from the top layer to the very bottom layer, but also endless hacks in basic CRUD operations. I will show you in this article how I have added custom CRUD functions on top of EF’s ObjectContext to make it finally work well in a fully disconnected N-tier web application (my open source Web 2.0 AJAX portal – Dropthings) and how I have produced a 100% unit testable fully n-tier compliant data access layerfollowing the repository pattern.
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Step by Step screencasts to do Behavior Driven Development on WCF and UI using xUnit
I am trying to encourage my team to get into Behavior Driven Development (BDD). So, I made two quick video tutorials to show how BDD can be done from early requirement collection stage to late integration tests. It explains breaking user stories into behaviors, and then developers and test engineers taking the behavior specs and writing a WCF service and unit test for it, in parallel, and then eventually integrating the WCF service and doing the integration tests. It introduces how mocking is done using the Moq library. Moreover, it shows a way how you can write test once and do both unit and integration tests at the flip of a config setting.
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Rescue overdue offshore projects and convince management to use automated tests
I have published two articles on codeproject recently. One is a story where an offshore project was two months overdue, my friend who runs it was paying the team from his own pocket and he was drowning in ever increasing number of change requests and how we brainstormed together to come out of that situation.
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ParallelWork: Feature rich multithreaded fluent task execution library for WPF
ParallelWork is an open source free helper class that lets you run multiple work in parallel threads, get success, failure and progress update on the WPF UI thread, wait for work to complete, abort all work (in case of shutdown), queue work to run after certain time, chain parallel work one after another. It’s more convenient than using .NET’s BackgroundWorker because you don’t have to declare one component per work, nor do you need to declare event handlers to receive notification and carry additional data through private variables. You can safely pass objects produced from different thread to the success callback. Moreover, you can wait for work to complete before you do certain operation and you can abort all parallel work while they are in-flight. If you are building highly responsive WPF UI where you have to carry out multiple job in parallel yet want full control over those parallel jobs completion and cancellation, then the ParallelWork library is the right solution for you.
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Unit Testing and Integration Testing in real projects
I am yet to find a proper sample on how to do realistic Test Driven Development (TDD) and how to write proper unit tests for complex business applications, that gives you enough confidence to stop doing manual tests anymore. Generally the samples show you how to test a Stack or a LinkedList, which is far simpler than testing a typical N-tier application, especially if you are using Entity Framework or Linq to SQL or some ORM in data access layer, and doing logging, validation, caching, error handling at middle tier. There are many articles, blog posts, video tutorials on how to write unit tests, which I believe are all very good starting points. But all these examples show you basic tests, not good enough to let your QA team go. So, let me try to show you some realistic unit and integration test examples which should help you write tests that gives you confidence and helps you gradually move towards TDD.