One of the major benefits of the Agile Development movement has been to move unit testing to its rightful place as the software development technique. It has also supplied us with a family of unit testing frameworks to assist with this task. Unit testing, however, takes effort and skill to do well, especially for applications such as distributed systems.
Unit testing code is at the core of developing high-quality software, but is not widely understood in practice, and is too important to defer to the end of a project. It serves a very different purpose when used as part of Test-Driven Development, rather than a practice for reducing errors in existing code. We're still discovering new techniques and practices, and find there's lots of scope for discussion and dissension.
This workshop is one of a series concerned with bringing together and sharing experience between people who have experience of unit testing of software, particularly for Test-Driven Development.
The workshop will serve not only as a meeting point to exchange ideas about unit testing, but also as a "matchmaking" event between people with testing questions/problems and people with solutions. In this sense, the workshop will focus highly on the social interaction component. In the unit testing workshop which we held at OT2002 in Oxford, we used a parody of the television show "The Dating Game" to match up people best suited to helping each other. We would like to use this and similar games/techniques to keep the atmosphere light and easy-going, and to avoid inhibiting participants who would otherwise be shy about sharing their problems and fears.
Participants are requested to submit a position paper detailing their experience with unit testing, and illustrating what they've done to expand the boundaries of unit testing. Typical examples would include extensions to the xUnit testing framework, automating tests etc. The organizers will accept position statements based on originality, relevance and suitability for discussion.
Please mail your submissions (preferably in PDF) to Joseph Pelrine (jpelrine@metaprog.com) by September 15.
The results of the workshop, as well as the accepted position papers, will be published on a web site, and will be made available to the community at large.
Joseph Pelrine is C*O of MetaProg, a company devoted to increasing the quality of software and its development process. He has been doing eXtreme Programming long before it was called that, and his tools and add-ons (including SUnit 3.0 and the Refactoring Browser IDE integration) have helped numerous projects increase the quality of their testing, integration and deployment. He a maintainer of the (official) Camp Smalltalk SUnit release, is internationally recognized as speaker, presenter and author, and his tutorials on testing at XP2001, XP Universe, OOPSLA and other conferences have been eXtremely well-received.
Steve Freeman is a Software Architect at Thomson Financial. Previously, at Lombard Risk Systems, he led a project that, briefly, was the largest XP project in the UK. Steve has worked in a wide range of situations from research to developing shrink-wrap software. He has a Diploma and PhD in Computer Science, and degrees in Statistics and Music. Steve is an early member of the Extreme Tuesday Club, one of the authors of the first Mock Object paper, and maintains the Mock Objects website.
Tim MacKinnon pioneered the use of eXtreme Programming at Dashboards Software in early 1999, and at Connextra a year later. As a senior developer at Connextra, he has led the teams that created the Sidewize and ActiveAd products. Tim was an inventor of the Mock Objects testing technique, Gold Cards, and was a founder of XPDeveloper - a site that encourages developers to document their experiences with XP. Tim has presented tutorials and workshops on eXtreme Programming and eXtreme Testing worldwide.
Joseph and Steve have presented a "test-run" of this workshop at OT2002 in Oxford.
Steve and Tim have run Tutorials on test first programming at OOPSLA 2001 and XP 2001.
Joseph has run numerous workshops and tutorials on testing at OOPSLA, Smalltalk Solutions, XP 2001, XP Universe, Net Object Days, and other places.
All three are on the committee for Workshop on Testing in XP, at XP2002 in
Sardinia.