Re: test suite, introdutory help.

[Brian Jones <cbj at gnu dot org>]

"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>