Welcome to Vincent Massol

[Thomas Paul]

A big JavaRanch welcome to our guest author for the week, Vincent Massol who wrote "JUnit in Action". Vincent will be here for the rest of the week answering our questions about his book and JUnit.
At the end of the week four lucky winners will win a copy of Vincent's book!
So let's get this forum woken up and start asking your questions!

[vasu maj]

Welcome Vincent!
Cab you briefly explain about Junit and also if possible about the various testing tools available in the market - WinRunner, WebKing, Silk, LoadRunner etc.

Thanks,
vasu

[Vincent Massol]

Hi Vasu,
A good web site about JUnit and its extensions is http://junit.org. For unit testing, you should definitely use JUnit or an extension. This is the de facto standard.
-Vincent

[Vincent Massol]

Originally posted by Thomas Paul:
A big JavaRanch welcome to our guest author for the week, Vincent Massol who wrote "JUnit in Action". Vincent will be here for the rest of the week answering our questions about his book and JUnit.
At the end of the week four lucky winners will win a copy of Vincent's book!
So let's get this forum woken up and start asking your questions!

Thanks Paul for the warm welcome. Is there anyway for me to be warned automatically when someone's posting a question (like receiving an email, etc)?

[John Applebey]

Vincent,
How did you become an author of technical books. When did you decide to be an author. Please tell us more about yourself as well as your feelings about the future of JUNIT.
Warm Regards
John

[Vincent Massol]

Originally posted by John Applebey:
Vincent,
How did you become an author of technical books. When did you decide to be an author. Please tell us more about yourself as well as your feelings about the future of JUNIT.
Warm Regards
John

Hi John,
Actually I have been participating to open source for several years now. First with the Cactus framework, then with others (MockObjects, Gump, Maven, PatternTesting, etc). Manning was looking for someone to write on the subject of JUnit. As I have been participating to open source projects on the subject of unit testing, someone referred them to me. They asked me if I wanted to write a book on JUnit. I said yes
It's my first book and it's a huge undertaking, especially if you're writing it while having a day work...
Future of JUnit:
Well, JUnit has not been evolving for years. However, there are so many extensions to it and so many integrations with open source and commercial tools that it is difficult to replace it... In any case, nowadays, you usually code with extensions of JUnit:
- mock objects
- cactus
- dbunit
- abbot/jfcunit/etc
The base (JUnit) is stable (and standard) but the extensions are evolving greatly and they are more and more specialized for a given testing use case.
My personal area of work has been inetgration testing. In all past projects I've seen projects become late because of integration which is often viewed as an afterthought. What I have working on for the past 4 yeards (both in open source land and at work) is to bring integration closer and closer to the development cycle, i.e. do not make it part of a step which comes after development but rather do it continuously during development. This has led me to Maven/Cactus/continuous builds.
A new trend I'm participating in (and also observing) is the usage of AOP for testing. It's still very early and tools are not very well adapted for that which leads to heavy and difficult to read tests. However, I'm sure we'll soon see some AOP frameworks focused on unit testing (there's the start of some but it's still early).
Thanks
-Vincent

[Brian McGuiness]

Does your book cover Cactus as well as non-EJB JUnit?
cheers

[Chris Fetterley]

Welcome Vicent!
Testing is one of the things I'm striving to get better at, any tips on how to make testing easier? How does one go about testing a project before it is created? I often have projects given to me with half information and I have to piece it together as I go along. How would I test something like this?

[Lasse Koskela]

Fellow 'ranchers,
May I ask you to say your "Hi" to Vincent here, and proceed to post your questions to in a new thread. Posts in this thread are not eligible for the book promotion prize

[Vincent Massol]

Originally posted by Brian McGuiness:
Does your book cover Cactus as well as non-EJB JUnit?
cheers

Answer is yes to both. All chapters show the different valid ways of writing the unit tests and compares them. For example, the chapter on unit testing EJBs will show you how to do that with JUnit/Mock Objects, pure JUnit and with Cactus. Same for all other chapters.
-Vincent
PS: Please post on another thread...

[Amy Phillips]

Welcome Vincent!
Good to have you here. If you want to help me with my testing dissertation please feel free to read this post
Enjoy your week.
Amy

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Vincent Massol:

Is there anyway for me to be warned automatically when someone's posting a question (like receiving an email, etc)?

Unfortunately, the forum software doesn't provide this feature.