By: Michael Orton

Michael Orton — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 22:57:46 +0000

I am convinced we could not have delivered the last big project I worked on without a JUnit test suite which performed a basic regression test in about 4 minutes which would have taken hours to do manually. Yet the test suite has caught me out in that it has to use a mock mechanism for database access and we use a very powerful piece of middleware to hide the real database from the application layer. The snag is that this layer creates lots of clones of the objects during any update cycle and unlike true SQL or any normal object based system, you cannot assume that any other object you are pointing to will be at the same logical point in time of that update cycle. Bugs caused by this effect cannot be found by the mock database used by the JUnits.
So we can regression test, and give the management the numbers they want in terms of tests run and percentage passed, but just how meaningful the numbers are is questionable. But in a world which requires the numbers to exist even though few people read them and fewer still understand them, this is probably the best value for money we can give them.

Comments on: Exploratory Testing

By: Michael Orton