Design Driven Testing: Test Smarter, Not Harder [Paperback]

Matt Stephens (Author), Doug Rosenberg (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430229438 | ISBN-13: 978-1430229438 | Publication Date: September 16, 2010 | Edition: 1

The groundbreaking book Design Driven Testing brings sanity back to the software development process by flipping around the concept of Test Driven Development (TDD)—restoring the concept of using testing to verify a design instead of pretending that unit tests are a replacement for design. Anyone who feels that TDD is “Too Damn Difficult” will appreciate this book.

Design Driven Testing shows that, by combining a forward-thinking development process with cutting-edge automation, testing can be a finely targeted, business-driven, rewarding effort. In other words, you’ll learn how to test smarter, not harder.

• Applies a feedback-driven approach to each stage of the project lifecycle.
• Illustrates a lightweight and effective approach using a core subset of UML.
• Follows a real-life example project using Java and Flex/ActionScript.
• Presents bonus chapters for advanced DDTers covering unit-test antipatterns (and their opposite, “test-conscious” design patterns), and showing how to create your own test transformation templates in Enterprise Architect.

What you’ll learn

• Create unit and behavioral tests using JUnit, NUnit, FlexUnit.
• Generate acceptance tests for all usage paths through use case thread expansion.
• Generate requirement tests for functional requirements.
• Run complex acceptance tests across the enterprise.
• Isolate individual control points for self-contained unit/behavioral tests.
• Apply behavior-driven development frameworks like JBehave and NBehave

Who this book is for

Design Driven Testing should appeal to developers, project managers, testers, business analysts, architects—in fact, anyone who builds software that needs to be tested. While equally applicable on both large and small projects, Design Driven Testing is especially helpful to those developers who need to verify their software against formal requirements. Such developers will benefit greatly from the rational and disciplined approach espoused by the authors.

Table of Contents

1. Somebody Has It Backwards
2. TDD Using Hello World
3. “Hello World!” Using DDT
4. Introducing the Mapplet Project
5. Detailed Design and Unit Testing
6. Conceptual Design and Controller Testing
7. Acceptance Testing: Expanding Use Case Scenarios
8. Acceptance Testing: Business Requirements
9. Unit Testing Antipatterns (The “Don’ts”)
10. Design for Easier Testing
11. Automated Integration Testing
12. Unit Testing Algorithms
13. Alice in Use-Case Land
14. ’Twas Brillig and the Slithy Tests

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Matt Stephens is a Java developer, project leader, and technical architect with a financial organization based in central London. He's been developing software commercially for over 15 years, and has led many agile projects through successive customer releases. He has spoken at a number of software conferences on object-oriented development topics, and his writing appears regularly in a variety of software journals and websites, including The Register and ObjectiveView.

Matt is the co-author of Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP (Apress, 2003) with Doug Rosenberg, Agile Development with ICONIX Process (Apress, 2005) with Doug Rosenberg and Mark Collins-Cope, and Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: Theory and Practice with Doug Rosenberg (Apress, 2007).

Catch Matt online at www.softwarereality.com.

Doug Rosenberg is founder and president of ICONIX Software Engineering, Inc. (www.iconixsw.com). Doug spent the first 15 years of his career writing code for a living before moving on to managing programmers, developing software design tools, and teaching object-oriented analysis and design.

Doug has been providing system development tools and training for nearly two decades, with particular emphasis on object-oriented methods. He developed a unified Booch/Rumbaugh/Jacobson design method in 1993 that preceded Rational's UML by several years. He has produced more than a dozen multimedia tutorials on object technology, including COMPREHENSIVE COM and Enterprise Architect for Power Users, and is the coauthor of Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML (Addison-Wesley, 1999) and Applying Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML (Addison-Wesley, 2001), both with Kendall Scott, as well as Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP (Apress, 2003) with Matt Stephens, Agile Development with ICONIX Process (Apress, 2005) with Matt Stephens and Mark Collins-Cope, and Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: Theory and Practice with Matt Stephens (Apress, 2007).

A few years ago, Doug started a second business, an online travel website (www.VResorts.com) that features his virtual reality photography and some innovative mapping software.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (September 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430229438
• ISBN-13: 978-1430229438
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #277,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #95 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Testing

More About the Author

Matt Stephens is a software consultant with a financial organization based in Central London. He's been developing software commercially for 20 years, and has led many agile projects through successive customer releases. He has spoken at a number of software conferences on OO development topics, and his writing appears regularly in a variety of journals and websites, including The Register and ObjectiveView.

Matt is also the founder of independent book publisher Fingerpress: www.fingerpress.co.uk

Catch Matt online at: http://articles.softwarereality.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Eye opener, September 22, 2010

By 

I. Chishty (Birmingham, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Design Driven Testing: Test Smarter, Not Harder (Paperback)

'Design Driven Testing: Test Smarter, Not Harder' is the second book that I've read by authors Doug Rosenberg and Matt Stephens, the other being 'Use Case Driven
Object Modelling with UML Theory and Practice'. Once again I've been impressed, not only by the content but also, by the manner in which concepts are presented. I have a technical background and spend a considerable amount of time reading journals, blogs, articles and books and I especially enjoy it when the author screams out with passion for his/her subject, as in this case.

Before reading this book I'd not heard too much about DDT and even now it doesn't seem to be generating a huge amount of noise. I think this is maybe because a lot of people and organisations have spent vast amounts of time, money and hard effort investing in TDD.

I've been fortunate to have used TDD on many projects and it never surprises me the number of times when 'TDD' projects are not actually 'TDD'. From a high-level it seems really simple but then again simple things are not always what they seem.
By reading the accounts of Rosenberg and Stephens it's amazing how much one can learn not just about DDT but also TDD. It was also fascinating to learn that a lot of things I've done in the past have been very compatible with the DDT approach, such as robustness analysis and testing `hot-spots'.
I'm not sure if I'll be making the move to a pure DDT approach, but nonetheless it's shown flaws in past TDD projects that I've been part of (e.g. chasing code coverage, lack of design and not thinking deeply about acceptance testing).
The book is a good read and I appreciated the examples and simple concepts such as top 10's. I highly recommend the book even if you're not likely to use DDT because, like me, it's made me think long and hard about TDD and how to get the most out of it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Be smart about your testing, October 3, 2010

By 

Al - See all my reviews

This review is from: Design Driven Testing: Test Smarter, Not Harder (Paperback)

Summary:
In software development there is no shortage of methodologies. A seasoned software development team will be careful not to plunge headlong into a particular methodology without properly understanding its strengths and weaknesses. As the proverb says "A person seems right until someone comes forward and questions him." This book provides insight into challenges you may face with a bottom up approach (TDD in particular) and offers a top down approach (the reverse of TDD, or DDT).

Audience:
This book will prove useful to several audiences - managers, architects, analysts, developers and testers. Software development isn't about one role (for example testing) dominating the life cycle - instead it is an ongoing collaborative approach. This is where design and modeling can help to transfer the right requirements to classes and into code. The design drives test cases naturally.

Likes and Dislikes:
The conversational style of writing pulls the reader into the discussion around challenges with proper testing of a real application. If you already understand the benefits of software modeling, you will quickly appreciate how your knowledge can help with smarter software testing. The authors are not advocating an either/or approach between TDD and DDT. Both can coexist but TDD has some blind spots to be aware of. Those who use Enterprise Architect as their modeling tool will be pleased to find several useful screenshots and examples included.

Those who have read and benefited from previous books by the authors will find some of the earlier information repetitive. Thankfully the authors point readers to their other references and quickly move on.

Level of experience required:
Even though the focus of this book is on testing, the ideas run much deeper and complement other books on Domain Modeling by the authors. This is really a book that will help a software team prepare for testing in a well-rounded manner. All levels of experience should read and benefit from such a book.

Recommendation:
This book is a great reminder to take a step back and examine what you are trying to accomplish in a software project. Developing aimless test methods without knowing the bigger picture can potentially lead to wasted time - something no one can afford. Be smart, test the right things. Abstraction and iteration work so use them. I heartily recommend this book for those looking to test software projects using a proven, team oriented, common sense approach.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended, September 26, 2010

By 

Estanqueiro - See all my reviews

This review is from: Design Driven Testing: Test Smarter, Not Harder (Paperback)

For those who couldn't believe that it was possible to have upfront analysis and design in an agile, test driven mindset (acceptance testing included), this book shows exactly how to do it, step by step.
Doug Rosenberg and Matt Stephens introduce us DDT, Design Driven Testing, a broader approach than TDD (that is presented at the beginning of the book to show the differences). I liked very much the Chapters about design-oriented testing, with controller and unit tests, and analysis-oriented testing, that presents customers (generally forgotten tests), business analysts and QA tests.
But the authors really deliver what they promise at the subtitle "Test Smarter, Not Harder" when they present the Controller tests, which cover more functions with fewer tests and when you use a tool that integrates the code and the design. A real example of a real application using a real tool makes things seem more, let me say, real.