Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Unit Testing

As some of you may know, I am TAing a class this semester. It is called "Analysis of Software Artifacts" and it covers many different forms of analysis from static and dynamic analysis to things like testing and formal inspections. It's taught by my advisor.

This week, as it turns out, my advisor is out of town, and I will be giving the lecture in his place. As it turns out, I actually volunteered to do this. Each of the TAs has to give a lecture this semester, but since I am really interested in the subject of unit testing, I chose to do this week's lecture. The lecture is going to be on a combination of unit testing philosophy and unit testing tools. I'll post the slides whenever I actually get them done. The lecture will also include some neat demos, for which I will post the source code as well.

The neatest tool I am demo-ing is a framework called EasyMock, which allows you to easily create and use mock objects in your JUnit test suites. It was (I think) developed at MIT, and it's an amazingly powerful tool. I subscribe to the Pragmatic Programmers' philosophy that unit tests should be by and for programmers, I definitely recommend you take a look at it.

In other news, this is a crazy busy time right now! This lecture and another big presentation are coming up. I feel like I am not getting any research done...

No comments:

Post a Comment