I'm writing this from Googles office in London, UK where Google is hosting a conference on Automated Testing. Testing of software that is. There's been very little talking about usability testing or hardware testing. There's been a lot of talks about taking unittesting taken to the next level.
I'm going to blog again about the stuff I learn today. Below is a summary of the stuff I learnt yesterday. Just coming to see the Google office was a very interesting experience. It's very impressive. The office building is beautiful and has a nice feel to it. One of the most impressive things about this office is the free-food canteen which I've used almost excessively but nobody except my girlfriend and my kung fu teacher will minds. I'm only here for two days and they can afford it :)
Yesterday, some people of HP Lab talked about SmartFrog which was an advanced system for not just testing the applications but also testing the production system. It seems like a good idea to do more testing on the production deployment and not just the source code. Most of it went over my head.
Following that was a talk from Kizoom about Agile Testing Language where they've developed a Java module that makes it possible to write unittesting source code in Java that looks very naturual English-like. That meant that source code became so easy to understand that customers or business analysts can join in on the test creation. Reminds me about the statement about Python that "Python is executable pseudo code".
After that was a talk by two Swiss guys from Lifeware about testing their insurance software by creating tests from real objects. Some insurance product cases are so complicated that it would have been difficult to create a test case beforehand. Seemed like a good idea but people seemed inheritently negative to the idea because tests should be written before it's too late.
Following that was a talk by Rick Mugridge about Fit, FitNesse and storytesting. Rick is supposed to be some sort of guru on the subject and when the presenter presented him he said: "A tool you've probably all heard of: Fit". I haven't. Haven't heard of him either. Sorry Rick, testing really isn't my thing. The only testing I do is some simple functional unittesting.
The next talk was about using contracts in Eiffel to automatically create tests. A very neat thing that he demonstrated was the ability to "filter" the source code to only those lines that matter when a test fails. Almost like a traceback when an exception is thrown but with a few more capabilities.
Lastly it was a talk by two googlers called Joe and Adam(?) about how to reconsider an AJAX application to refactored components that can be unittested. It was mainly just common sense but their demo was interesting because the code that they refactorered looked aweful. It was more or less one big function that did all the various tasks which was later split up neatly into a view, controller and datasource. I said it was all common sense stuff but, to be honest, the initial code that they refactored looked a lot like some of the javascript stuff that I produce. The title of their talk was witty: "Does my button look big in this? Building Testable AJAX Applications"
To be continued...
UPDATE
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