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Dakar Testing

Hi,

lately I convinced Michele to start learning Smalltalk. I’ve been a Smalltalk developer for several years and really like this language. But it’s not only the language, it’s also the IDE. Smalltalk IDEs have always been to first IDEs when it comes to creating new features that help developers do their work. That is testing with SUnit, which was developed in the early 90s or refactorings, which were added to Smalltalk IDEs in the mid 90s.

After some time other languages like Java and C# got Unit testing frameworks as well, and their IDEs (Eclipse and VisualStudio) can do refactorings too, but the first implementation was in Smalltalk. There’s a simple reason for this: Smalltalk is a very simple language with really cool features, like Blocks (Ruby developers should also know them 😉 ) and the whole IDE is also written in Smalltalk. So this makes Smalltalk a great language for trying out new stuff. For example the people over at the SCG at the university of Bern (link) added Traits to Smalltalk.

Last summer I wrote a tool called Dakar Testing together with Damien Cassou for the Smalltalk IDE VisualWorks. The idea of Dakar Testing is to simplify the creation and the management of SUnit tests. To do this, Dakar Testing adds another editor next to the existing source-code editor. This editor is used to create and edit the tests that are assigned to the selected method. In between those two editors is a list showing all tests that are assigned to the selected method, so it’s also easy to see which tests stress which code and which tests need to be run.

I wrote a small article about Dakar Testing a few month ago and I also created an image that you can use to try out Dakar Testing. The article can be found here and the image for VisualWorks NC 7.5 can be downloaded here. The image also contains a Readme that you really should read if you’re not familiar with Smalltalk.

Karsten

Posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 17:20 under New ideas.
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One Response to “Dakar Testing”

  1. briksoftware Blog » Blog Archive » Diplom Says:
    July 10th, 2007 at 12:50

    […] goes out to everyone who helped my writing my diploma thesis!!! It was about Dakar Testing, which I blogged about […]