Re: Unit Test Tools

From: Tim X <timx_at_nospam.dev.null>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:31:22 +1000
Message-ID: <877hyzsb79.fsf_at_lion.rapttech.com.au>


Lee <Lee_at_Jamtoday.com> writes:

> I've just read a whole bunch about Test Driven Design, automated unit
> testing, xUnit, JUnit, Quest's code testing tool (at $595 a pop, or some
> such....eek!) , utPLSQL, pl/unit, and PLUTO. Whew!
>
> Has anyone had any experience with any of the above, either the TDD idea in
> general or any of the specific tools/frameworks alleged to make it all
> better?
>
> What sage advice can be had from those in the trenches before me?
>
> Our people would be coding in pl/sql, of course.
>

Yep. I looked at a few. Most of them werre overly complex for what I needed.

In the end, I grabbed PLUTO and played with it for a while. It is simple, but provides pretty much all you need. However, I found a number of problems with it and a few bugs. I think it wold be fair to classify PLUTO as a proof of concept rather than a finished or under development solution.

In the end, I pretty much stole the basic ideas in PLUTO and re-implemented - its actually quite small. There are still some rough edges, but everyone using it has found it is useful for meeting our TDD needs. There are a number of things I want to improve, but just now, getting the job done has priority.

It took me about 2 days to re-implement PLUTO, including a couple of extensions that made what we are doing a bit easier. The one thing we have given up using at present is PLUTO's ability to dynamically generate the run_tests procedure. While this is a nice feature, we found on a larger RAC based system that having PLUTO dynamically generate the run_tests procedure when you execute your test made it really really slow. For now, developers must write and maintain their own run_tests method.

Apart from that, it pretty much provides the necessary scaffolding that is useful in getting a standardised set of unit tests. It is very similar to junit for Java or Perl's simple Testharness stuff. anyone familiar with either of these should have no problems.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
Received on Fri Jun 26 2009 - 09:31:22 CEST

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