qa

I was reading a book recently and I ran across the following quote, which I think comes from Bruce Tate:

Think of a unit test as another client of your application.

That resonates for me on many levels, and it's a great way to think about test code. I also like the following quote, but that may be because I said it:

I know this code is wrong because I can't test it.

Yours in unit testing. ;)

One Java programming "best practice" that has been strongly reinforced for me during the last several weeks is making sure you have a declared interface that defines the behavior (signature) of your Dao (data access objects) classes.

Automated GUI testing tools FAQ: I've read that you've done a lot of work with automated GUI testing tools, can you share some "lessons learned" about your automated GUI testing tools experience?

I'll come back and update this article from time to time as I run into more "lessons learned", but after writing my last article (Seven benefits of automated GUI testing), I also wanted to share these ideas on "Automated GUI testing best practices."

Automated GUI Testing Software: If you happen to be looking for something to do this weekend, here's a very early release of our free (GPL) Agile GUI Testing software (AGT).

In short, just download the file below, and when you un-tar it, it will create a "scripts" folder. That folder contains our GUI testing software, along with two sample scripts. If you'd like to see how the sample scripts work, they are shown in this two-minute YouTube video (Agile GUI testing, basic demo).

The Spring Framework gives you a great way to test your Spring JDBC (Spring DAO) code. Just use a special Spring JDBC class with a very long name, and you can test your Spring JDBC code against a real database.

Some people don't like this approach, but I think it's invaluable for (a) testing your SQL syntax when you first create it, and (b) making sure your SQL syntax is still valid after database changes occur.