Welcome

TestED is an ecplise plugin aimed towards helping Java developers to improve testing while doing test driven development. The inspiration is drawn from pair programming and the benefits of practicing it. As an example it’s very easy to miss a simple test case with “null” as input when you’re deep into your code. Simple oversights like that can easily be detected during pair programming or peer review of finished code, though even better would be if your IDE could tell you about them.

TestED eclipse plugin is as of may 2013 a proof of concept working on simple scenarios with only strings or integers as method input parameters.

How TestED works

It’s not meaningful to give developers suggestions on how to improve testing if the developer is not in the mindset of recieving feedback. So when is the right time?

In test driven development the idea is that you first create one test case, you implement the code necessary to pass that test case. Then you add another test case as well as minimum code that makes the new test case pass. This goes on until the requested functionality is complete.

The best opportunity would be when the developer says ”I’m done”, though that is impossible for the software to now and we didn’t want this plugin to be yet another software that needs to be run at the end of some development cycle. A compromise here is that the TestED plugin will run as soon as JUnit from within eclipse has finished. Suggestions or hints of improvements won’t be given on functions that hasn’t been tested at least twice already. As a last note all tests must pass for TestED to be executed this is because if a developer has written a test case and that doesn’t pass yet the priority for the developer must be to solve that first.

Who is TestED for?

As it still proof of concept, TestED is for developers that are interested in testing and how it can help other developers develop better software.

Continue to next section for an example on what kind of hints you get.