Coding Is Like Cooking

It’s Java Forum next week, here in Göteborg. I’m giving a short talk about TestNG, a tool I’ve been using lately.

My basic conclusion is that TestNG is a very easy step from JUnit, and one you don’t need to take if all your tests are true unit tests (ie fast and independant). TestNG has some nice features which help when your tests are slow and/or have external dependencies, especially if they are mixed together in the same test classes as true unit tests. I think it’s pretty useful for unit and integration tests. (aka quadrant 1, technology facing).

Having said that, what bothers me about TestNG is that it means your test code is written in Java. For me, that makes it unsuitable for for system tests, (aka quadrant 2, business facing). If you have anything resembling an involved customer, you’re going to at least want to encourage them to read the system tests to verify they are correct, and to gain confidence that the system is working. Truly agile teams have these people helping write tests. Many customer types won’t be happy working with Java. You might be able to get by, though, if you have descriptive test names, good javadoc, and test data in separate files that they can read.

Rather than spending time learning TestNG, I think you may get more payback from tools such as Fitnesse, Robot or TextTest, which all allow you to get customers involved in reading and even writing tests. I think it could be a perfectly sensible choice to stick with JUnit for unit tests, and use one of these tools for both integration and system tests. What you choose will of course depends on the situation, for example the size of the system, the nature of the test data, and how many tools your team is willing to learn.

I spoke at Smidig2009 about a month ago, and they have now put up videos of all the talks. So I just had the uncanny experience of watching myself speak (here is a link to it). I’m sure my swedish accent sounds better in my head when I’m talking, but I do apparently get my point across, since about a dozen people turned up to do a code kata with me in the open space in the afternoon.

I’ve just heard that I’ve been accepted as a speaker at JFokus, in Stockholm in January. I’ll be saying something about how to write good tests using Selenium, a tool I’ve been using a fair amount lately. I’m looking forward to the chance to meet up with the wider Java community in Sweden and find out what’s new and what’s hot.

I’m off to Oslo on Wednesday for Smidig 2009. They’ve just announced the programme, which consists of lightning talks in the morning, and open space in the afternoons. I’ll be giving a lightning talk on Friday morning about why you might want to go to a coding dojo. I’m hoping there will be enough interest to run a Randori/dojo in the afternoon. Someone commented that there have been dojo meetings in Oslo before, so I’ll be interested to find out if they do them the same way I’ve been doing them.

The conference talks are mostly going to be in Norwegian, but mine isn’t the only item in Swedish. I spotted Ola Ellnestam (agical) and Thomas Nilsson (responsive) on the list too. So if it turns out that I find spoken Norwegian totally incomprehensible, there will be a few people I can talk to!

I wrote a blog post about these tools on my company blog. In swedish.