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Software quality update

posted under category: General on March 4, 2008 at 12:00 am by Nathan

I said a few months back that I had decided to go head first into software quality as a general scope to become proficient at, so here's an update. I'm proud to announce that I've been making good progress.

I have been using Selenium to test some of my web applications. It can get complicated, but so far it has been marginally worth it. After figuring out the system, I set up a test suite for one app and have been working on it. I will blog about this experience soon.

I looked into CFUnit and CFCUnit. These are both CFC unit testing tools. If you google it, you won't learn which is better. They both have really good pluses. I went with CFCUnit because Sean Corfield and Chris Scott said so and it was easier to get working. Unit testing, even on the handful few components I applied it to, has already paid off really well. I will be doing more of this.

I made a couple Ant scripts. It's definitely starting to pay off, so I'm not giving up. I think I just now "get" the paradigm, so things are picking up. I will blog this one soon, probably after Selenium.

I will be playing with these new tools for a long while now before declaring myself king (or whatever it is I do before I get bored and move on).

Some day, I would like to explore some sort of DBUnit testing. I am seeing at least half a dozen angles for this, but two in particular. First, to test database relational integrity and just performing crud operations on all the tables, I would need a framework to support that - this isn't unthinkable to do in CFCUnit. Second, to snapshot my data's current state for when the data changes due to any testing and I would like to be able to change it back, quickly and easily.