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EclipseTestingDay2010 Talk Andrena
One suite that suits them all
In software projects with sizeable code bases maintaining the suite of all unit tests regularly becomes an issue: developers want to be able to execute the entire collection of tests with a single command, but an AllTests suite that lists the test cases explicitly must be kept manually, which is inefficient and error-prone.
The well-known ClasspathSuite[1] solves this problem elegantly, but it has its weaknesses, too: it becomes slow on large workspaces and executes static code blocks in all classes when loading and analyzing them, which can cause unexpected effects and in some cases make the tests fail.
The Eclipse IDE allows to run all tests in a single Java project or source folder directly from the context menu, but doesn't extend this functionality to the entire workspace. (For good reasons, as we will explain in the talk.) There are approaches to mitigate this issue (e.g. [2]), but they have their own shortcomings. Still, they clearly show the need for a solution in this area.
After discussing the current status of test suite management in Eclipse, we introduce a new approach to address these issues; we'll also demonstrate a prototypical implementation which we are currently developing at Project Usus[3].
[1] http://johanneslink.net/projects/cpsuite.jsp
[2] http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/run-all-tests
About the speaker
Leif Frenzel is senior developer and agile coach at andrena. He has extensive experience in the design and implementation of Eclipse-based software (both IDE tooling and RCP applications). His recent interests include responsible development and clean and sustainable software design.
Marc Philipp studied Computer Science in Karlsruhe and specialized in experimental research of Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Pair Programming. In 2008 he joined andrena to work as software developer. His current interests include work on software development tools, such as JUnit and Project Usus.
Slides
http://wiki.eclipse.org/images/b/b6/EclipseTestingDay2010-OneSuite.pdf