andreas-schlapsi.com » Software Development

When Is a Test a Unit Test?

aschlapsi — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:54:03 +0000

Developers write their tests usually with a unit test framework. Often those tests are slow and unreadable. Almost always the tests communicate with a database, a file system, a web service or other external resources. Developers stop executing the tests regularly and further they stop writing tests entirely, because “unit tests” are so slow and hard to maintain.

Michael Feathers has already summarized the criteria for unit tests in September 2005:

“A test is not a unit test if:

It talks to the database

It communicates across the network

It touches the file system

It can’t run at the same time as any of your other unit tests

You have to do special things to your environment (such as editing config files) to run it.

Tests that do these things aren’t bad. Often they are worth writing, and they can be written in a unit test harness. However, it is important to be able to separate them from true unit tests so that we can keep a set of tests that we can run fast whenever we make our changes.”

Developers often even do not write unit tests! They are writing integration tests instead. Sometimes it takes more than knowing the test attributes of the used unit test framework to write real unit tests!

Technorati Tags TDD, unit-testing

Windows Installer 4.5 SDK no longer available as stand-alone download

aschlapsi — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:55:02 +0000

Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is now available to download. It includes the latest SDK for Windows Installer 5.0. Therefore the stand-alone version of the Windows Installer 4.5 SDK is no longer available for download.

Using Bazaar and Launchpad on Windows

aschlapsi — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 08:05:20 +0000

Bazaar is a distributed version control system (DVCS) written in Python with many interesting features. Like all DVCS it supports disconnected operation which means that you don’t have to be connected to a central repository to commit changes or to view the history.

Launchpad is a free software hosting and development site. Another well-known site of this category is Sourceforge. Launchpad was originally created for Ubuntu and is now used by many other open source projects, e.g. Zope and Silva CMS.

Erik Thomson wrote some tips about using Launchpad and Bazaar on Windows and made a video tutorial.

When I tried to make a first branch at Launchpad on Windows I had some problems, though. I got errors like “bzr: ERROR: Don’t know how to handle SSH connections. Please set BZR_SSH environment variable.” or “bzr: ERROR: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified”. To push changes from the local branch to Launchpad Bazaar needs the python library paramiko for SSH connections and it were missing on my system. Paramiko requires pycrypto, binaries for Windows can be found at The Voidspace Python Modules. To install paramiko install pycrypto first, extract the downloaded zip package, change to the directory and call “&path to python&\python setup.py install”.

After installing the missing libraries everything worked fine and you can find a branch for the RowTest extension for NUnit at Launchpad.

Technorati Tags Bazaar, launchpad