Saturday, September 11, 2010

JavaOne 2010 Abstract of the Day #7: Unit Testing That's Not That Bad

ThoughtWorks Application Architect Neal Ford is scheduled to present "Unit Testing That's Not That Bad: Small Things That Make a Big Difference" at 2:30 pm on Monday, September 20, in Parc 55's Embarcadero, and the session's JavaOne 2010 ID is S312988.  The abstract for Neal Ford's presentation states:
To a lot of managers and developers, unit testing seems like pure overhead. But professionally responsible developers know that it's one of the keys to quality. This session will cover small tools that make testing easier and faster. The session will discuss tools such as Infinitest, Jester, Mockrunner, Hamcrest, Groovy, RSpec/easyb, Selenium, and others. While none of these tools are elaborate enough for its own session, together they add up to more than the sum of the parts. This session will also show tools and strategies to streamline testing, making it easier and more palatable for both managers and developers.
Learning about "small tools that make testing easier and faster" definitely sounds promising.  One of the main things I look for in a conference session is introductory information regarding tools, libraries, or frameworks that I know little or nothing about.  Even if I decide not to use the covered tool, library, or framework, it is time well spent to be able to make that informed decision before investing more time and effort.  I am not familiar with all of the tools listed in this abstract and look forward to learning more about them and how they make testing easier.

As Ford's abstract states, he will be covering a wide set of tools including the Groovy programming language (one of my favorite development tools), Hamcrest constraints matchers (also being covered in John Ferugson Smart's JUnit Kung Fu presentation), Mockrunner framework, Selenium (Firefox add-on for web testing), RSpec/easyb (Behavior-Driven Development frameworks), Jester (beyond code coverage), and Infinitest (continuous test runner with Eclipse and IntelliJ plug-ins).

Ford was named a JavaOne Rock Star at the last three editions of this conference (2007 JavaOne, 2008 JavaOne, and 2009 JavaOne) for presentations on topics such as Groovy, JRuby, unit tests that "suck less", design patterns for dynamic JVM languages and advanced debugging techniques.  In fact, his 2009 JavaOne presentation "Unit Testing that Sucks Less: Small Things that Make a Big Difference" (PDF) probably gives a good idea of what this year's presentation will cover.

Neal Ford will also be presenting "Comparing Groovy and JRuby" (S312989) at JavaOne. That session is scheduled for Tuesday, September 21, 11:30, at Parc 55 in Divisidero.  Neal has given presentations with similar titles at 2008 JavaOne and 2009 JavaOne.  You may also find the slides and samples Neal has provided from conferences he has presented at worth downloading and reading.

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