I am sure all of you are familiar with eXtreme Programming practice Test-First Design. This practice promotes the use of unit tests as a way to flesh out the interface of a class and make that class testable by design and very user friendly. In other words you write one test case then make it compile by coding a stub version of the class under test then you make the test pass by fleshing the content of the stubbed method(s). The unfortunate side effect of this is your unit test doesn't compile until you have gone to the next step and created the stubs. The current code completion doesn't help and is not usable. I would call this backward code completion where the completion is done against something that is already done.
To help Test-First design you need another kind of completion. I will call it "forward completion". While writing my test, as I introduce a use of a new interface of the class under test I can trigger the generation of a corresponding compilable stub. The method generation would use the type of the lhs of the call to determine the return type and would use the call arguments type to determine the function parameter types. If the function has a return type a dummy value would be returned (0 or null). I am not sure we need the generation of data members but it could follow the same process. No other IDE has support for this Test-First or Top-Down design approach. This could rally a lot of XP people under IntelliJ! Jacques Morel Sr. Application Architect nextjet mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (214) 292-3273 _______________________________________________ Eap-features mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellij.com/mailman/listinfo/eap-features
