magpiebrain

Recently there has been much talk of the perceived deficiencies in JUnit. Much of this discussion has focused on the implementation issues of JUnit, but none of them have actually addressed if JUnit (or a rewrite of JUnit) is actually suited to one of the main areas it is being used in, namely in Test/Specification Driven Design. As I “mentioned before(magpiebrain – It’s time to drop the ‘T’ from TDD)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2004/07/05/tdd, the constant reference to the word ‘test’ can lead to a misunderstanding of what TDD actually is – one proposed solution was to drop the word ‘test’ altogether. Others are looking at writing tools which can more closely match what we are trying to achieve with test/specification driven design.

As part of my month long period helping run London’s “Geek Night”:http://geeknight.thoughtworks.com/index.php/GeekNight, we’ll be having a presentation of JBehave, which is being written as a JUnit replacement. Rather than simply attempting to reproduce method call for method call what JUnit does, it is changing the language used in an effort to help change the developers mindset, whilst at the same time improving support for other specification techniques such as mock objects. Personally, I’ve yet to actually see the thing running, so I’m hoping the demo will at least be informative! “Nat Pryce(Mistaeks I Hav Made)”:http://nat.truemesh.com/ is also threatening to demo his latest project, although I still don’t fully understand it so it’s best to come along and see for yourself…

_[Update 11:44, 19/07/2004]_ : Nat sent this along to explain what his tool does:

It’s a way of specifying “tell don’t ask” object-oriented code that addresses some of the limitations of mock objects and can be used to generate useful documentation.

If you want to pop along and see if it’s any good, make comments, heckle, throw rotten fruit or whatever, just pop along to the “Geek Night Wiki(Geek Night London 21 July 2004)”:http://geeknight.thoughtworks.com/index.php/GeekNightLondon21July2004 and put your name down. Any questions (like how to get there), feel free to “drop me a line”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/contact.