Friday, July 30, 2010

Speaking at the Eclipse Testing Day

My colleage at andrena, and fellow blogger over at Crafting Code, Marc and I will give a talk at the Eclipse Testing Day in Darmstadt on Sep 8th. Here's the abstract:
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 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. this Plug-in), 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.
 (If you want to join us at the Testing Day, here's the registration link :-)