I have read/watched so much about TDD & BDD recently that I really want to master it. I have been a developer that only writes code and then tests it from outside (like we always started). The problem seems to be in getting up and running with TDD. I want to just create a simple Winform app in which I want to show a list of something lets say products. I just don't know where to get started, should I write a test for controller first? the controller needs reference to view and service and so on so forth. ASP.Net MVC is built for testing therefore it is a bit easy to get started but Winforms are a real pain. Kindly give me some Videos (Most preffered) that show TDD in Winforms.
I have watched tons of videos that show you testing a class or feature but how do you test UI that does not support testing?
In short I want to know if anyone has been doing TDD for a while, how
does he/she do it in Winforms?
I have written loads of code that I just delete because I get stuck, Please help!
Here's how I do it for any kind of UI, be it Web or Winforms or WPF or Swing in Java or even a web service interface that's going to be used by another system.
Write the UI, and hard-code any data behind it.
Write a controller, and move the hard-coded data to the controller. The controller should just be presenting the data in a form that the UI can understand.
Your controller now has no behavior; just static data - but it's got the right API for the UI, and now you know how the UI wants to use it.
Write an example that shows how the UI will use the controller in the most basic form.
Make the example work.
Write another example that shows how the controller behaves differently in a different context.
Make the example work.
Those are your unit tests! If you know that your controller is going to need some other classes to collaborate with, you can mock those out too.
Once your collaborators are mocked out, you already know how the controller wants to use them. Again, you have the API for those collaborators already, because the controller is using them.
This is what we're doing when we talk about "outside-in" in BDD.
I'm new to TDD too, and just like you I'm trying to learn. Here's what I've come up with during my searches, maybe it will help you too:
Check out Roy Osherove's website, and also his book "The Art of Unit Testing". Check out the videos, there are some great ones, especially the "Pair Programming" section. His book was the single best book that I've read about unit testing and TDD, and the only one that I've read from cover to cover.
Check out some TDD katas. There are some on the web page I've suggested in the previous item. Check out how other people are solving the katas. It's really helpful.
Read about dependency injection.
If you want to TDD in WinForms, check out the MVP pattern. As far as I know, it's the de facto patten for separating UI from business code in WinForms.
Good luck with your search.
The controller is a good starting point. Extract the View public api to an interface an test the interaction of the controller with that interface using a Mocking Framework. You can do the same for the service layer too.
Also, I would take the bottom-up approach for this application and unit test the lower level layers before adding tests to the UI layer. On the UI layer I will write a set of Acceptance Tests using a BDD framework and use mocking frameworks to make those tests lightweight and to reduce the number of tests.
Good luck!
Related
I'm very new to Unit testing and TDD. I'm clear with TDD concepts theoretically, but I'm having lots of impediments in implementing that. Most of the examples explains how to do unit testing for Multiply, adding two numbers, etc., which is not we really need in real time.
For angular, it is much better, we can check the values of array, existence of Controller, using the service, mocking the backend, etc., So now I have couple of questions,
How can do Unit testing for Backend process like how the request is being handled ?
My application mostly interacts with UI components, Can I use protractor in my TDD process, for example Drawing tool, how can I do testing without drawing(interacting) anything on it ?
There are many orm framework available in nodejs to generate testdata if you want to generate data in your traditional DB and use your backend as it is.
jugglingdb and sequelizejs are the most popular one.
Even to make it more manageable you can implement cucumber or jasmine framework with protractor, so you can manage after and before hookups for individual test-scenario.
I'm a testing noob and I need to test a JSF application. So I only just started exploring JSFUnit (read: I've googled it and StackOverflow-ed it), which as I understand uses/extends JUnit, HTMLUnit, HTTPUnit and other units that I have no idea about.
The thing is, the app uses Hibernate and what I want to know is whether or not I can use JSFUnit to create comprehensive tests that encompass model, view and controller, not to mention all that the HTTPUnit supposedly does?
Also, if I'm using Primefaces Dialog Framework so that my dialogs are not in the same page that opens said dialog, would I be able to test this approach? Or would it be better, in terms of testing, if my dialog was on the same page?
I hope my questions make sense. I promise they made sense in my head. Any help in this regard would be highly appreciated.
It seems that you require something more complex than pure unit tests.
Take a look at Selenium framework, as it simulates user interaction through a real recorded use case, and is easy to work with.
Hi one of my client needs unit tested application in asp .net webforms. But I have no Idea about how to start or unit tested applicaton/MVC. I would like to know how to create unit tested application in webforms. Any example, video, tutorial will be helpfull.
Thnaks
I suggest you do the following things:
Start asking your client and yourself what it is you want to achieve? Merely unit testing for no other reason than saying you are unit testing is not a worthy goal to pursue.
Read some introductory book like The Art Of Unit Testing to make yourself familiar with unit testing.
Consider reading this ASP.NET MVC book because it takes you through all layers of an ASP.NET MVC app while applying unit testing at each of those layers (with really good examples).
I agree with point 1 of meilke's answer. Adding unit testing to an existing application can be a lot of work and without a good reason, it's unlikely a customer will want to pay for it. It is possible however to use a request to add or remove functionality as an opportunity to get started. For example, if you have a task to remove some existing functionality then putting a set of unit tests in place to verify the existing behaviour of the application can save headaches later on. Think of it like putting scaffolding in place before doing construction work.
It's not clear from your question but if it's ASP.NET WebForms as distinct from ASP.NET MVC that you are looking to unit test, I would recommend looking into the Model View Presenter design pattern. Here and here are a couple of articles that should help.
I'm working on a project that has client and server side. And I'm writing a "pre-check-in" tool that will validate a lot of our communication between client and server.
I already have unit tests on both sides, now I really want to test the integration between both.
Like a real client connection to the server and vice-versa.
I really want to go unit testing on this, but I'm having a really hard time figuring out how I can initialize the MMVMCross framework and my view model classes.
In another thread I've asked for help on my "console app" that runs the tests but it is also really hard to initialize the framework and it makes me loose the coolness of unit testing with Visual Studio and reSharper.
My view models use SQLite and HttpClient with async/await.
For instance: I can't find a way to instantiate a view model that would need this interfaces:
IChatService, IMvxMessenger, IDataService, ISettingsService
Some from the framework some from my own code.
I known and I'm trying to register my ones, on a TestFixtureSetUp, but off course this fails, as the MVVM base subsystem (ioc?) is not setup yet.
Some above services, like IDataService for instance, also needs ISQLiteConnectionFactory, IMvxMessenger, ISettingsService.
I know unit testing is supposed to be fast, but my idea is to put all this tests in a new Category, that I would run only before my check-ins and my buddy, server developer, would run before his check-ins.
What would be the best approach here?
Any hint, suggestions, things to investigate/study would help at this point, as I'm practically stuck on this one.
Sergio
For instance: I can't find a way to instantiate a view model that would need this interfaces:
IChatService, IMvxMessenger, IDataService, ISettingsService
Generally this would be done using Mock implementations and then calling the ViewModel constructor directly with those Mocks.
I'm having a really hard time figuring out how I can initialize the MMVMCross framework
In order to initialise the IoC part of the framework you can use the MvxIoCSupportingTest helper class -https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross/blob/v3/Cirrious/Test/Cirrious.MvvmCross.Test.Core/MvxIoCSupportingTest.cs
If you then need additional parts of the framework, then generally you should mock these in some way. For example, see how navigation is mocked in these two articles:
http://blog.fire-development.com/2013/06/29/mvvmcross-enable-unit-testing/
http://slodge.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/n29-testing-n1-days-of-mvvmcross.html
If it helps, an example of this type of test is https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross-Tutorials/blob/master/Sample%20-%20TwitterSearch/TwitterSearch.Test/TwitterViewModelTest.cs#L21
If this answer doesn't have sufficient information, please provide a bit more example code about the tests you are trying to write.
Unit testing and ASP.NET web applications are an ambiguous point in my group. More often than not, good testing practices fall through the cracks and web applications end up going live for several years with no tests.
The cause of this pain point generally revolves around the hassle of writing UI automation mid-development.
How do you or your organization integrate best TDD practices with web application development?
Unit testing will be achievable if you separate your layers appropriately. As Rob Cooper implied, don't put any logic in your WebForm other than logic to manage your presentation. All other stuff logic and persistence layers should be kept in separate classes and then you can test those individually.
To test the GUI some people like selenium. Others complain that is a pain to set up.
I layer out the application and at least unit test from the presenter/controller (whichever is your preference, mvc/mvp) to the data layer. That way I have good test coverage over most of the code that is written.
I have looked at FitNesse, Watin and Selenium as options to automate the UI testing but I haven't got around to using these on any projects yet, so we stick with human testing. FitNesse was the one I was leaning toward but I couldn't introduce this as well as introducing TDD (does that make me bad? I hope not!).
This is a good question, one that I will be subscribing too :)
I am still relatively new to web dev, and I too am looking at a lot of code that is largely untested.
For me, I keep the UI as light as possible (normally only a few lines of code) and test the crap out of everything else. At least I can then have some confidence that everything that makes it to the UI is as correct as it can be.
Is it perfect? Perhaps not, but at least it as still quite highly automated and the core code (where most of the "magic" happens) still has pretty good coverage..
I would generally avoid testing that involves relying on UI elements. I favor integration testing, which tests everything from your database layer up to the view layer (but not the actual layout).
Try to start a test suite before writing a line of actual code in a new project, since it's harder to write tests later.
Choose carefully what you test - don't mindlessly write tests for everything. Sometimes it's a boring task, so don't make it harder. If you write too many tests, you risk abandoning that task under the weight of time-consuming maintenance.
Try to bundle as much functionality as possible into a single test. That way, if something goes wrong, the errors will propagate anyway. For example, if you have a digest-generating class - test the actual output, not every single helper function.
Don't trust yourself. Assume that you will always make mistakes, and so you write tests to make your life easier, not harder.
If you are not feeling good about writing tests, you are probably doing it wrong ;)
A common practice is to move all the code you can out of the codebehind and into an object you can test in isolation. Such code will usually follow the MVP or MVC design patterns. If you search on "Rhino Igloo" you will probably find the link to its Subversion repository. That code is worth a study, as it demonstrate one of the best MVP implementations on Web Forms that I have seen.
Your codebehind will, when following this pattern, do two things:
Transit all user actions to the presenter.
Render data provided by the presenter.
Unit testing the presenter should be trivial.
Update: Rhino Igloo can be found here: https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rhino-tools/trunk/rhino-igloo/
There have been tries on getting Microsoft's free UI Automation (included in .NET Framework 3.0) to work with web applications (ASP.NET). A german company called Artiso happens to have written a blog entry that explains how to achieve that (link).
However, their blogpost also links an MSDN Webcasts that explains the UI Automation Framework with winforms and after I had a look at this, I noticed you need the AutomationId to get a reference to the respecting controls. However, in web applications, the controls do not have an AutomationId.
I asked Thomas Schissler (Artiso) about this and he explained that this was a major drawback on InternetExplorer. He referenced an older technology of Microsoft (MSAA) and was hoping himself that IE8 will do this better.
However, I was also giving Watin a try and it seems to work pretty well. I even liked Wax, which allows to implement simple testcases via Microsoft Excel worksheets.
Ivonna can unit test your views. I'd still recommend moving most of the code to other parts. However, some code just belongs there, like references to controls or control event handlers.