Developer News

JUnit Factory Wins!

2008-03-06T21:27:26Z

As we mentioned previously, JUnit Factory was a Jolt Award Finalist for 2008. Well, we won! Last night at the award ceremony, we were pleased that JUnit Factory received the 2008 Jolt Productivity Award in the Testing Tools category. (Read all about it in the press release. A full listing of all the 2008 Jolt award winners is available here.)

Learn more about JUnit Factory — and try it free! — at junitfactory.com.

JUnit Factory is a Jolt Award Finalist!

2008-01-03T22:29:05Z

Agitar's unit testing solutions have been helping developers work smarter since 2004. Our commercial products have won Jolt awards each year for the past three years, but we decided that software quality was too important to restrict to developers in big corporations.

A year ago, we made our Java test generation service available for free through JUnit Factory. Since then, we have delivered over a million tests to thousands of users in more than a hundred countries.

Now, JUnit Factory has been named as a Jolt Award finalist for 2008 and we're hoping it wins the award to go along with the three previously won by its commercial big brothers...

Agitator won in 2005... ...and again in 2006... ...and AgitarOne got the big prize last year...

Why not try JUnit Factory for yourself? You can generate JUnit tests for your entire Java project by downloading our free plug-in for Eclipse - or just try our online demo.

Ted Husted Article: How to maintain apps you didn't write

2008-01-03T21:36:19Z

Ted Husted (of Struts fame) has written a great article that talks us through using JUnit Factory to generate JUnit tests for JPetStore.

In this article, we'll use JUnit Factory to create a suite of standard JUnit tests for the Spring JPetstore business layer, so that we can refactor or extend the business logic with confidence. As we change the JPetStore code, we'll run the tests to see whether we have broken any of the code's existing behavior. As we go along, we can update the tests by hand, generate new tests, or both.

Ted's article, published in JDJ, describes how characterization tests help to bring an unfamiliar application under test, making maintenance safer and easier.

Unit tests give us the confidence to change applications, even legacy applications that we didn't write ourselves. To avoid the drudgery of writing a test case for every edge and boundary, we can let JUnit Factory generate a large set of characterization tests for us. If we need to explore an existing code base, characterization tests can act as a learning guide by documenting what the code actually does. If we need to change existing code, characterization tests act as critical "change detectors" that help us avoid unforeseen side effects.

No More Mr. Nice Guy!

2007-12-12T18:33:59Z

Alberto Savoia gets tough in his campaign to improve quality in the software industry.

Welcome Africa!

2007-12-05T18:02:28Z

Perhaps in response to my earlier post noting that,

JUnit Factory is not yet popular in Siberia, Greenland or Africa

there has been a huge surge in activity from Egypt. So far in December there has been more activity from Egypt than from any other country making this the first month where the US has not occupied the top spot! Oh. Did I mention that JUnit Factory has served over one million tests during 2007?

Run your hand-written tests. Quickly.

2007-09-25T19:52:56Z

AgitarOne has had the ability to run hand-written JUnits since 4.2 but it was disabled in JUnit Factory until we were able to make them run in a safe sandbox. If you have a lot of JUnit tests and you want a quick and easy way to run them and report on the results, request a Developer Dashboard and we'll run them for you on our server farm. They'll run much more quickly when they are distributed across 20 CPUs. Developer Dashboards are great for open source projects. Just request a dashboard and send the resulting link to your team. Here's an example where one of the Cruise Control committers has requested a dashboard:

Dashboard for Cruise Control

There are full instructions for Developer Dashboards at www.junitfactory.com/dashboards/.

Do you speak Japanese?

2007-09-25T19:46:36Z

As if it weren't enough that the traffic to www.junitfactory.com has doubled in the last month, we just rolled out a Japanese version of the site. Visits from overseas come in waves. The USA is always top of the list but the top three places are filled variously by German, Australia, China, Japan, France, Spain and Brazil (South Africa is currently #2). With the translation into Japanese, we hope to welcome a lot more visitors from Japan. If you are curious to see what www.junitfactory.com looks like in Japanese (and even if you are not), I highly recommend the wonderful Quick Locale Switcher for Firefox.

Where in the world...?

2007-08-27T21:04:37Z

JUnit Factory is not yet popular in Siberia, Greenland or Africa, but it's doing quite well everywhere else. Here's a snapshot of visitors by city over the last few weeks: (click on the map for a larger image)

Agile 2007

2007-08-06T20:39:39Z

Agile 2007 starts next week and Jeff Fredrick, Bob Evans and I will be there. Bob will be giving his much acclaimed "To catch a bug you have to think like a bug" presentation and Jeff will help you learn how "Create change one 'Tic Tac' at a time". We also have a booth on the expo floor so if you have a burning question about AgitarOne or JUnit Factory - or if you just want to chat about testing - stop by and say 'hi!'

June Trivia

2007-06-27T17:31:26Z

There are now over 1000 registered users. Many of them use JUnit Factory every day.
During June, JUnit Factory generated 20,000 tests for 2,000 users in 90 countries
June was the first month where there was more activity on JUnit Factory from the UK than from the USA.
Only half of JUnit Factory visitors are native English speakers.
Top languages include: Japanese, German, Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian and Spanish
The top referring sites were in Japan (javanews.jp and d.hatena.ne.jp), Germany (javamagazin.de) and the USA (cafeaulait.org)

Early Access Feature - Publish a Dashboard

2007-05-08T22:09:47Z

The ability to generate dashboards has been a popular feature of AgitarOne for a long time but, with the new release rolled out this week, you can now generate a dashboard with JUnit Factory. To generate a dashboard for your project, 1. Select your project in the Eclipse Package Explorer 2. Click the Generate Dashboard button in the toolbar JUnit Factory will run all of your tests and then publish a dashboard. Your dashboard will be hosted on www.junitfactory.com so don't publish a dashboard unless you really want your project to be visible on a public website. This is a very early version of a new feature, so we'd appreciate any feedback, comments, complaints or bugs that you can send our way. I generated dashboards for some toy projects that I had lying around on my hard drive so you can see how the dashboard will look:

Diplomacy - play diplomacy over IM
Spectrum - an emulator for the Zilog Z80
Genetic - a library for genetic programming

The first two have helpers (you see the jump in coverage where I added the helpers). The third project does not. You'll need to update your plug-in to generate a dashboard.

Where are you?

2007-04-27T20:55:48Z

We are getting visitors from all over the world. People from all these countries used JUnit Factory during the month of April:

Wherever you are from, welcome!

Help with Homework

2007-04-16T22:57:30Z

We have noticed a few college professors setting homework assignments based around JUnit Factory… …like this one at George Mason University.

Reconsider the pattern matching example from assignment 7. Send this code off to JUnitFactory, and analyze the generated tests. Write a brief (one or two paragraph) summary of the resulting tests. In particular, you might want to contrast the JUnitFactory tests with the dataflow tests you encoded by hand in assignment 7.

…and this one at Carnegie Mellon University.

In this section you will judge the ability of the automatically generated unit tests to find bugs in the Othello program. We will do this by pointing out three specific, existing bugs in the Othello program.

We are currently designing a short assignment that will expose students to the idea of characterization tests. If you'd like collaborate - or just give us feedback - let us know at feedback@junitfactory.com or join the discussion on our forums. If you are teaching a course in software testing and have set a similar assignment, we'd love to hear about it!

Blog Roundup

2007-04-16T21:03:55Z

We are starting to see a few unsolicited reviews of JUnit Factory popping up in the blogosphere. Here are some of the most recent:

Struts Webinar Recording

2007-04-06T21:13:53Z

Our Struts webinar on Tuesday was a great success. If you missed it first time around, you can watch the whole presentation online here. If you have any questions about the webinar or about how you can generate characterization test for your Struts application with JUnit Factory come and join the discussion on our forums at http://forums.agitar.com.