Exploration Through Example

Earlier in the series:
Controller channels

“Omit needless words” is number 13 of Strunk&White’s elementary rules for composing English. It’s a pretty good rule for composing tests, too, but not followed often enough. Let’s rewrite an example of the sort of test I often see.

(more…)

I am going to write a document called “The Mechanics of Business-Facing Automated Tests”. I’ll be posting drafts of the different chunks here, hoping that you’ll help me improve it. I’m interested in improvements to the ideas and the flow of explanation rather than line-by-line or word-by-word improvements. Thanks.

The sample application is only a realistic sketch. It pretends to be the server part of a system used by travel agents. For my own convenience, I wrote the application in Ruby, but I’m treating it just as I would were it in Java. The tests are written in Ruby for the reasons I gave earlier.

In normal use, the application is a server that communicates with a client and with airline servers. The server communicates to the client via XML messages over a network. To communicate with airline servers, it drops files on disk to be picked up by FTP. Airline servers deliver files in the same way.
(more…)