Hi Mikhail,
None of my test messages to the list from this account seem to have reached
their destination. I'll keep my fingers crossed for this response though...
Mikhail Loenko wrote:
On 1/27/06, George Harley1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But because we live in a less than ideal world there will, no doubt, be
some tests that will demand an
environment that is impossible or at the very least difficult to mock up
for the majority of developers/testers.
I'm absolutely agree that we are neither living in the ideal world nor trying
to make it ideal :)
C'mon. We are all trying to make it ideal. :-)
So until we got a 'system' test suite why should we weaken existing tests?
Uh ? I don't think that is what I was proposing.
One solution could be to segregate those tests into a separate test suite
(available for all but primarily
for those working in the niche area that demands the special environment).
Moving this kind of tests would affect many people: they will see
separate suites,
try, ask questions...
It would affect people in as much as they would see a number of different
test suites that could be potentially run. Some test suites would need some
more configuration up-front than others. The information about that would
be captured either in text files alongside the test code and/or in other
project documentation residing elsewhere (Harmony web pages, wiki pages
etc).
It is a communication thing.
If the test can be configured by a few people only who works on that
specific area and those people are aware of those tests why not just
print a log when the test is skipped?
Sure. And it should be the role of the test framework to inform users
about which tests got run, passed, failed, got skipped etc.
It would not disturb most of the people because the test will pass in 'bad'
environment. But those, who know about these tests will sometimes grep
logs to validate configuration.
Why use logs to tell us information that the unit test framework can already
provide ? Who wants to have to grep through log files when the test runner
can provide us with what we need ?
Thanks,
Mikhail
Alternatively, they could be
included as part of a general test suite but be purposely skipped over at
test execution time using a
test exclusion list understood by the test runner.
Best regards,
George
________________________________________
George C. Harley
Tim Ellison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
27/01/2006 08:53
Please respond to
[email protected]
To
[email protected]
cc
Subject
Re: [testing] code for exotic configurations
Anton Avtamonov wrote:
Note that I could create my own provider and test with it, but what I
would
really want is to test how my EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo works with
AlgorithmParameters from real provider as well as how my other classes
work
with real implementations of crypto Engines.
Thanks,
Mikhail.
Hi Mikhail,
There are 'system' and 'unit' tests. Traditionally, unit tests are of
developer-level. Each unit test is intended to test just a limited
piece of functionality separately from other sub-systems (test for one
fucntion, test for one class, etc). Such tests must create a desired
environment over the testing fucntionality and run the scenario in the
predefined conditions. Unit tests usually able to cover all scenarios
(execution paths) for the tested parts of fucntionality.
What are you talking about looks like 'system' testing. Such tests
usually run on the real environment and test the most often scenarious
(the reduntant set, all scenarios usually cannot be covered). Such
testing is not concentrated on the particular fucntionality, but
covers the work of the whole system.
A sample is: "run some demo application on some particular platform,
with some particular providers installed and perform some operations".
I think currently we should focus on 'unit' test approach since it is
more applicable during the development (so my advise is to revert your
tests to install 'test' providers with the desired behavior as George
proposed).
However we should think about 'system' scenarios which can be run on
the later stage and act as 'verification' of proper work of the entire
system.
I agree with all this. The unit tests are one style of test for
establishing the correctness of the code. As you point out the unit
tests typically require a well-defined environment in which to run, and
it becomes a judgment-call as to whether a particular test's
environmental requirements are 'reasonable' or not.
For example, you can reasonably expect all developers to have an
environment to run unit tests that has enough RAM and a writable disk
etc. such that if those things do not exist the tests will simply fail.
However, you may decide it is unreasonable to expect the environment to
include a populated LDAP server, or a carefully configured RMI server.
If you were to call that environment unreasonable then testing JNDI and
RMI would likely involve mock objects etc. to get good unit tests.
Of course, as you point out, once you are passing the unit tests you
also need the 'system' tests to ensure the code works in a real
environment. Usage scenarios based on the bigger system are good, as is
running the bigger system's test suite on our runtime.
Regards,
Tim
--
Anton Avtamonov,
Intel Middleware Products Division
--
Tim Ellison ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
IBM Java technology centre, UK.
