Developer Testing: Agitation

Tests Vs Specifications

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 17:00:30 -0800

Reading Brian Marick's post on Tests and Specifications made me wonder about how to describe the assertions in Agitator. They certainly are of the form Brian describes:

In math geek terms, specifications are universally quantified statements, ones of the form "for all inputs such that is true of them, is true of the output." Tests are constant statements, ones with no variables. They look like this: "given input 5, the output is 87."

This distinction comes into play when we use TDD with Agitation. The tests help us move forward one case at a time and then Agitiator helps us review if we've accurately captures the specification of the system, or if we've missed boundary cases. It is a shift from the "There Exists" to the "For All" mindset.

Agitator is Not a Test Generator

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:16:57 -0800

Agitator is not a test generator. It is an exploritory testing tool for developers. You turn to it to answer the questions "what does this code actually do? what did the author forget to consider?"

Violent Agreement

Mon, 26 Jan 2004 18:28:54 -0800

In his blog Patrick Logan makes a very good point that "we have to make a distinction about what kinds of tests we're writing and what kinds of tests we want to automate."