Test-Driven Development on The Dangling Pointer

Xcode & Snow Leopard - Logical unit tests hanging

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:41:17 +0000

I haven't written unit tests before in Xcode. I started to read Apple's article on unit testing with iPhone development because I wanted to follow sound development principles with an agile approach. Not long into the guide, I got stuck. Literally. Using Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard caused Xcode to lock/hang during the build of the logical unit test. Same results after iPhone SDK 3.1 came out. I couldn't find anything online either except a few people experiencing the same issue. In the system console (not Xcode console) I was seeing:

An idea for a college course :: Unit Testing

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 04:27:35 +0000

After spending a significant amount of time this week on writing JUnit tests for a Spring Web app, I've come to a conclusion. College courses, even in the grad classes I am taking don't spend enough time on the concepts behind unit tests. Granted JUnit and NUnit has been covered in the classes I've had but really only the testing framework is discussed.

Test-driven development (TDD) teaches us how to write a test first, make it fail, stub out your methods, and then code until your test passes. The practicality of TDD in the real world is limited because a requirement is to have your system well designed up front. Getting to a point where you'll know method names ahead of time means you've spent a significant amount of time thinking about the design and analyzing that design.

JUnit Testing

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:58:59 +0000

I'd like to point out that writing JUnit tests after the fact is a pain in the ass. I like to think I know enough about software engineering to develop software that has high cohesion and limited coupling. Not following test-driven development allows me to forget some of those simple rules and now writing EasyMocks is killing me.