Imagine you had an elder brother or sister in your family. (S)He is stronger than you, both physically, and trained in martial arts, and you have not. Recently (s)he started to behave weirdly. What would you do? When would you speak up?
Continue reading What would you do?Category Archives: Testing
Software Testing
Data-driven tests in Junit5.0.0-SNAPSHOT
It’s been a while since I wrote code these days. Back in late April however I found myself in a Coding Dojo at the Düsseldorf Softwerkskammer meet-up working on the Mars Rover Kata. I have a story to share from that meeting. However, since I tried to reproduce the code we ended up with that night, and I decided to give JUnit5 (and Java8) a go for that, I ended up with a struggle.
Back in the days with JUnit4 I used the ParameterizedRunner quite often to use data-driven tests. I never remembered the signature of the @Parameters function, though. The Mars Rover Kata also includes some behavior that I wanted to run through a data-driven test, but how do you do that in JUnit5? I couldn’t find good answers for that on the Internet, so I decided to put my solution up here – probably for lots of critique.
Please note that I used JUnit 5.0.0-SNAPSHOT which is a later version than the alpha, but probably not the final one.
Continue reading Data-driven tests in Junit5.0.0-SNAPSHOTState of Testing 2016 – My view
Usually I don’t write many promotions for other’s contents on this blog as I try to keep it personal and focused on my personal views. Recently I was contacted on the International 2016 State of Testing report, and whether I would like to do a write-up about it. I asked whether it would be ok to post a personal view, so here it is.
Continue reading State of Testing 2016 – My viewSo, I went for the board
End of August two years ago, I announced that I was going for the AST board. I kept my expectations pretty low, and I am glad that I did. Two years have passed, so I figured let’s revisit that decision from back then. Long story short: I won’t go for another two years. Read on to find out why.
Continue reading So, I went for the boardWhy you should go to CAST
Last year, when the Association for Software Testing announced the location for their next annual conference CAST 2015, Grand Rapids, MI, there was an up-roar happening on social media and back channels like Skype and private conversations. To my own surprise, I saw members of the context-driven testing community falling short of their very own principles. Rather than observing and interacting with people, it seemed that some persons preferred to derive their knowledge about Grand Rapids based upon a prior CAST conference there. Experience may be a good resource to start looking at, but I found that I should trust the folks from the local area that I knew to put together an awesome conference – more so since they could explain to me why the past experience was not so well received. When it came to the October 2014 AST board member meeting, Pete Walen, the conference chair, the guy who managed to send in a proposal prior to CAST 2014 so that the AST board could decide upon it, invited us to the conference location, so that it was easy to see for us where we were going with the proposal. Here is what I learned during my two nights in the conference venue – and why I think you should attend.
Continue reading Why you should go to CASTHow to sell TDD to <x>?
Every once in a while I read something like this:
Yeah, [TDD|BDD|ATDD] is great. But how do you convince [your manager|your employer|your colleagues] to get the time to do it?
In the past week I decided that I need something to point folks to when this questions comes up again. So, here it is.
On auditing, standards, and ISO 29119
Disclaimer:
Since I am publishing this on my personal blog, this is my personal view, the view of Markus Gärtner as an individual.
I think the first time I came across ISO 29119 discussion was during the Agile Testing Days 2010, and probably also during Stuart Reid’s keynote at EuroSTAR 2010. Remembering back that particular keynote, I think he was visibly nervous during his whole talk, eventually delivering nothing worth of a keynote. Yeah, I am still disappointed by that keynote four years later.
Recently ISO 29119 started to be heavily debated in one of the communities I am involved in. Since I think that others have expressed their thoughts on the matter more eloquently and deeper than I going to do, make sure to look further than my blog for a complete picture of the whole discussion. I am going to share my current state of thoughts here.
Continue reading On auditing, standards, and ISO 29119Principles of ATDD: Single Responsibility Principle
The other day, I sat down Kishen Simbhoedatpanday in order to talk about ATDD, and eventually an upcoming class on the implementation side of ATDD. We talked about maintainable tests, and how you could refactor tests to yield better tests. Gojko wrote about the anatomy of a good acceptance test a while back, and I think we can be more explicit here. Then it struck me. The Single Responsibility Principle also applies to your automated examples – and why that’s the case. You just need to think on a conceptual level about it. Mixing business domain concerns with application concerns in your examples – and sometimes even with driver concerns (think Selenium) – is a terrible thing to do.
Let’s explore this idea further.
Continue reading Principles of ATDD: Single Responsibility PrincipleWorking effectively with legacy tests
A couple of years ago I read a book from Michael Feathers that kept on being mentioned a lot in the literature I was reading then. The title? Working effectively with legacy code. Feathers makes some points on how to get code without tests working, by breaking down dependencies, introducing seams, and working towards more testable code. I loved that book.
When we take the idea of test automation as software development seriously, then there also should be a concept called legacy tests. That concept to me is related to testing debt, a term I think I coined back in 2009. But what are legacy tests? How do they slow down your productivity? And what can we do about it?
Here are some limited experiences I made with a couple of legacy tests, and how to overcome them. I hope this blog entry will trigger some more experience reports from folks, so that fewer teams need to suffer from it.
Continue reading Working effectively with legacy testsNew names for the quadrants
In the past there have been multiple folks proposing a rename of the famous testing quadrants that Brian Marick wrote up a couple of years ago. Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory labeled them Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 in their Agile Testing book. That naming misleads some folks as they think about a progression in the four quadrants. I recently read something that triggered a thought. I think we should rename these quadrant completely, and drop the counting digit at all. While several other folks have tried to find new names for the quadrants, I came up with a different thought: let’s try to find person names for the quadrants. Here is my first proposal for those.
Continue reading New names for the quadrants