cwash into software

Developer Testing – The Basics

If you’ve never heard of developer testing, unit testing, etc. before, start here!

Wikipedia!

Arrange-Act-Assert

Unit Testing 101 by Kate Rhodes – If you’ve missed my talk, or want a reiteration of what my introductory talk on unit testing includes, take a look at this presentation.  I cover a few things a bit differently and hit more of the basics than this presentation.  It goes beyond what I include a bit, but the problem space is very similar.  There are a few things in this presentation that aren’t PC or SFW, but it stands on its own without a speaker and you can run through it pretty quickly.
Pragmatic Starter Series – These books are somewhat dated, but still provide a good foundation.  Take a good look at the book on Unit Testing and also the book on Version Control.  There are multiple editions of these books that provide example code or usage against specific tools.  Pick the edition you are most comfortable with or anticipate using.  I own the Java and Subversion editions.  They’re both widely used right now but you can’t go wrong with any of them.  I would also highly recommend you take a look at The Pragmatic Programmer as well.  This publisher puts out some very high quality books.

More Advanced Material for New Developers

Once you’ve conquered Red-Green-Refactor, and write Arrange-Act-Assert methods, take a look at these resources.

Test Driven by Lasse Kossela – This is a great high level book on test driving development in Java.  It provides the clearest explanation of a lot of the fundamental concepts you’ll need if you try to do TDD on any non-trivial project.

My Dev Testing Workshop – This is a project space for running through a testing workshop.  It’s an example that is borrowed from Test Driven that outlines a few requirements for a templating system (and corresponding test cases) that we can use to walk through the TDD process.  It’s set up as a Subversion/Maven project you can check out and use to try out some of the concepts.  If you’d like, contact me about scheduling a workshop where we can run through this exercise with you’re school/group.

Growing OO Software, Guided By Tests – This book explains how to use tests to effectively guide the software development process.  It’s not an introductory book, and I’d recommend it only after you’ve written a lot of tests on your own.  It will tie together concepts of test code, refactoring and design under a single unified view.  It’s highly recommended, but don’t approach it until you’ve tried testing out yourself first.

Expert Material

If you’re a Java Developer that does testing, but you feel you could be doing better, I’d recommend you take a look at the following resources.

Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

Take a look at the resources I’ve put under Unit Test Adoption on Stack Overflow.