Swing Extreme Testing: The Extreme approach to complete Java application testing [Paperback]

Lindsay Peters (Author), Tim Lavers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2008

This book is a practical guide to automated software testing for extreme Java programming using Swing GUIs, with lots of ready-to-use real-life examples and source code for automated testing of the software components usually regarded as too hard to test automatically. This book is for Swing developers who design and develop complex software for user interfaces that requires extensive testing. If you want to learn to test your Swing GUI components, this book is for you.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tim Lavers

Tim Lavers is a Senior Software Engineer at Pacific Knowledge Systems, which produces LabWizard--the gold standard for rules-based knowledge acquisition software. In developing and maintaining LabWizard for almost 10 years, Tim has worked with many Java technologies, including network programming, Swing, reflection, logging, JavaHelp, web services, RMI, WebStart, preferences, internationalization, concurrent programming, XML, and databases. He has worked with tools as well, such as Ant and CruiseControl. His job also includes a healthy mix of user training, technical support, and support to marketing. In his previous job, he wrote servlets and built an image processing library. Along with his professional programming, he writes and maintains the distributed testing tool, GrandTestAuto. He has published a JavaWorld article on RMI as well as a number of mathematical papers. Tim's hobbies include running and playing the piano.

Lindsay Peters

Lindsay Peters is the Chief Technical Officer for Pacific Knowledge Systems. He an experience of 25 years in software management, formal analysis, algorithm development, software design, and implementation for large commercial and defense systems. Ten years ago, Lindsay and his team were the early adopters of Java, coupled with more rigorous design processes such as Design by Contract. He then helped transition the development team to the Extreme Programming model. Out of this exciting and successful experience grew the "Extreme Testing" approach. In the early 80's, Lindsay managed a software team that was one of the first to incorporate the newly discovered simulated annealing algorithm into a commercial application. This team solved a previously intractable real-world problem, which was the optimum assignment of radio frequencies to collocated mobile radios. Apart from software development and artificial intelligence systems, Lindsay has an interest in mathematical convexity, and has helped to progress the "Happy Ending" problem. He is also involved in politics, and in the last Australian Federal election he stood as the Greens candidate for the seat of Bennelong.

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (June 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847194826
• ISBN-13: 978-1847194824
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,966,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Competent, Compact, Automated, Designed to the Authors Usecase, March 3, 2009

By 

ws__ (Hamburg, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Swing Extreme Testing: The Extreme approach to complete Java application testing (Paperback)

Yes, you can! Yes, you can test almost any aspect of your application and - provided you do have the tools - with relative ease. And the authors encourage you to actually do it. And they help you doing it with plenty of source code. Their "cyborg" an improved wrapper to java.awt.Robot is just great and of immediate use. I must admit that I immediately applied the thread testing chapter ideas (and some of the books helper code) to this suspicious part of my software: great relief. Since reading the landmark Java Concurrency in Practice, I am a little paranoid on that topic.

So who is the target audience?
At the core is the experienced Java developer not the quality control people or the managers. You should not only know Java quite well, you should also know a little about testing. Test Driven Development: By Example (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)is a good start.
Also it improves your benefits, if your projects are similar to the authors: Java rich client applications, distributed, RMI as communications protocol, databases of small size, artificial intelligence application and an agile development culture. For example if you do libraries and use a lot of classes, which are only visible in the package (quite sensible to do in this case) GrandTestAuto the special testing program of the authors will not be able to unit test your classes. Similar things hold for web or embedded or large database development.
Anyhow everything is supplied with source code. You can adapt it to your needs. Also the ideas are more important than the specific support tool implementations.

There is no reference section. The references are all distributed in the main text.

In summary I do recommend the book. It teaches you a lot and the reading is just plain fun. The book really draws you in.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must have book for Java application testing, July 10, 2008

By 

Vamseedhar R. Sane (New York, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Swing Extreme Testing: The Extreme approach to complete Java application testing (Paperback)

The challenge for developers with swing though is testing its components. Testing is one of the fundamental steps in application development and apparently, testing Swing has become a challenge for developers. By itself swing is very easy to test but since it is used as an emulator, it is often changed according to the needs of the application. Changes in the application are common during the development process and swing has to adjust to these changes - eventually testing its components a little bit harder.

This book aims to answer those questions and guide the developers on properly testing the Swing plug-ins in as little time as possible. This book will deal with a very important testing technique: automation. Through automation, testing will be faster and development will eventually be easier.

The book has only 300 pages but divided into a whooping 20 chapters. Expect information packed chapters right from the start. The authors have practically squeezed all possible information with regards to testing and eventually in testing in Swing.

Clearly this book is not for beginners of Java. The language is extensively discussed in this book but as integration for Swing. Developers of Swing should find this book extremely helpful because the book just does not discuss the Swing testing in theory but also in practice. There are a lot of source codes in this book that could be used by developers as a reference to build an interesting testing tool for their plug in. This book is practically a gateway for developers in building complicated applications using Java and Swing.

Swing Extreme Testing proves that there is an aggressive approach in testing Swing as a plug-in for Java applications. Don't be fooled by Swing's GUI since without the knowledge of the actual coding of the components of the GUI, you will be lost right at the start. This book will try to explain the source code associated with Swing and how to build tools that could test Swing and push the capacity of the plug-in. Although it might warrant a little bit more explanation, this book should be more than enough for a developer who understands Swing and the components that comes with it in order to build an efficient application.