"Testing towards A Specification: A Systematic Approach"

Peter Dimov has published his Master's thesis. To quote him:

It is based on Test Driven Development with Mock Objects, hence the focus is on interaction-based testing. I'm introducing the mocking framework CalitkoMocks, which is specially designed to provide a notation for writing tests that can be mapped one-to-one to sequence diagrams. Sequence diagrams are classically used to specify object-oriented software systems, however, it is obvious that just a bunch of diagrams representing individual cases cannot really be regarded as a specification. To address this point, I'm also presenting a few test refactorings which help to extract test scenarios (i.e. generalized test cases), which are more suitable to use as a specification.

He's implemented a mock framework for C++ that's part of Calitko

I especially liked his closing remark

After I drew the diagram corresponding to my test, I decided to try to write a test corresponding one-to-one to the sequence diagram. The sequence diagram showed the calls to my stub objects but my test didn’t (because the implementation invoked them implicitly). I ended up writing smarter versions of my stubs which eventually evolved into mocks. Though I had already read about mocks at that time, I didn’t quite get it what kind of beasts these were. It was only after I reinvented the mock that I truly understood the concept.

Perhaps this is a step on the way to addressing Jason Gorman's concerns.

XpDay London 19/20 November

We have a couple of sessions at XpDay London. Steve will be giving our Synaesthesia talk on Monday. On Tuesday, Nat, with Romily Cocking, Andy Pols, and Steve (part-time) will be giving an introductory tutorial on TDD with Mocks. Book soon!

Mock Throwable

Yesterday I visited a team at a Cyrus Innovation site. They came up with this example. If you can't read it, the writing on the ball says "Throwable". Cute.

Blogger in German?

On a side note, this blog is "powered by Blogger" and I keep getting bits of the UI text in German. Does anyone have any idea what's happening?

How to talk Mock

Brian Marick has posted an interesting proposal for changing the order of the pieces within a unit test. For example, he suggests moving from

def test_checker_normally_checks_network_once 
  checker = testable_checker # creates checker using mocks.
  @network.should_receive(:ok?).once.with(”url”).and_return(true) 
  checker.check(”url”) 
end

to

def test_checker_normally_checks_network_once 
  checker = testable_checker 
  during { 
    checker.check(”url”) 
  }.behold! { 
    @network.should_receive(:ok?).once. 
             with(”url”).and_return(true) 
  } 
end

which shows what you can do if you have a language with useful constructs.

Personally, I've tended to think of stubs and expectations in terms of pre-conditions and post-conditions, so I find the pre-test setup less disturbing—and I've been doing it so long I don't see it any more. I imagine it's rather like getting used to (+ 1 2), which Brian ought to recognise. If I were to have a go, I think I might try to write some like this:

during {
  checker.check("url")
}.expect_to_see {
  @network.ok?("url") { returning true }
  @timesink.sleep_for(32.minutes) { 6.times }
  but_not @listener.inform
}

It's nice to see someone experimenting with the ideas.