test suite, introdutory help.

test suite, introdutory help.

[Daniel Dallas]

Dear test expert,


I need your help.  I am the head tutor for an introductory software
engineering subject at RMIT in Melbourne Australia.  I work with
undergraduate students with no experience in software testing.

We design software with UML and then code it in Java, we are ok with
this.  We now want to write test harnesses and develop some test cases.
I and other tutors are new to this and are currently following a text
book written for structured programming.

Do you have a simple intro to writing test harnesses for object oriented
software?  I hope that projects like Mauve will be more practical then
our current text book, and provide a basis for earning to code a test
harness and devise some test cases. 

I had a look at this thread on the discussion:
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/mauve-discuss/2002-q3/msg00019.html
but this is programmed in shell.  I would prefer to write in Java,
though we could use shell.  Anyway, these scripts look too complicated
for the intro I'm looking for.

Do you have something simple for undergraduate Java programmers to start
writing (or using open source) simple test harnesses on their projects?

Thanks,
Daniel Dallas.
RMIT Melbourne.

Re: test suite, introdutory help.

[Brian Jones]

"Daniel Dallas" <ddallas@cs.rmit.edu.au> writes:

> Do you have something simple for undergraduate Java programmers to start
> writing (or using open source) simple test harnesses on their projects?

This depends on whether you are using a fully functional JVM or one of
the less functional free JVMs.  In the Java world, most programmers
use JUnit, I think from www.junit.org, which generally requires
reflection to work in the JVM.  In the developmental world of yet
another free JVM often testing needs to be done on a virtual machine
+ class library that doesn't have a functional reflection
implementation.

Mauve is simple in that we use something we have that we know works,
i.e. the shell, to find test cases and execute them.  JUnit uses java.
Both frameworks are similar in that tests indicate pass/fail and
through one means or another accumulate the results and display them
nicely.

Since you're using UML you should be able to at least think about how
to generate test cases for all of your object interactions.  I'm not
aware of work in the area of coverage analysis for Java although I
know some of this can be done through the profiling interface of
JDPA.  I think some of the truly expensive UML tools that go the step
of generating code or stubs also help with generating tests, but I've
zero experience with these.

-- 
Brian Jones <cbj@gnu.org>

Re: test suite, introdutory help.

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Thu, 2002-08-08 at 15:31, Daniel Dallas wrote:
> Do you have a simple intro to writing test harnesses for object oriented
> software?  I hope that projects like Mauve will be more practical then
> our current text book, and provide a basis for earning to code a test
> harness and devise some test cases. 
> 
> I had a look at this thread on the discussion:
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/mauve-discuss/2002-q3/msg00019.html
> but this is programmed in shell.  I would prefer to write in Java,
> though we could use shell.  Anyway, these scripts look too complicated
> for the intro I'm looking for.

As Brian already explained we have some special needs when running Mauve
with VMs that might not be very stable so they crash and burn while
running the test suite. That also means that we use as less advanced
features as possible. Please take a look at JUnit for a similar test
framework that doesn't have those constrains and which also comes with a
little bit more documentation <http://www.junit.org/>

> Do you have something simple for undergraduate Java programmers to start
> writing (or using open source) simple test harnesses on their projects?

I came across the following course that uses Mauve as an example of how
to write unit tests but which includes its own test framework. Maybe
that group can help.
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~jcleary/230/

Cheers,

Mark

Re: test suite, introdutory help.

[Anthony Green]

On Thu, 2002-08-08 at 06:31, Daniel Dallas wrote:
> Do you have something simple for undergraduate Java programmers to start
> writing (or using open source) simple test harnesses on their projects?

Check out junit.  I don't have a URL handy (I'm writing this at 30,000
feet), but you should be able to google it up easily.

AG