This purpose of this release is to work with the helios release and contains a few bug minor fixes.

A few other improvements were done to improve the code coverage for some plugins that were not tested too well.

Forthcoming releases will improve on the code coverage. Well, the irony.

Only Valid Measure of Code Quality

Image from http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

WTF implies lack of clarity. Clear code is easier to understand, easier to maintain and easier to extend.

Announcing saikuro_treemap — an easy to setup tool to generate complexity treemaps of ruby code.

See a demo for yourself.

Complexity Visualization of Rake

An embedded console or an interpreter is a very powerful tool, it allows you to do some very interesting things with your software as it is running, play around with it, tweak it and anything else you can ever imagine. All of this without the edit-save-compile-relaunch cycle.

Lately I’ve been working on an embedded console for eclipse. The primary motivation was to try out scripting approaches for SWTBot. But I soon realized that I was using it for more than just scripting tests. I was using it to learn how eclipse works, try out different approaches to decide which one is best.

Some of the features include code completion, history lookup. This is possible using jruby’s objectspace and the readline support.

Here’s a small teaser video of what you can do with it an embedded jruby console for eclipse.

The update site url is here http://dl.swtbot.org/update-site

The example here uses SWTBot APIs. But there’s nothing stopping you from using anything else in any of your other plugins.

Ganymede is now almost 2 years old and the last bug fix release was in Feb 2009.

There has been a Galileo release of Eclipse in the Summer of 2009, and there is a new release Helios coming up the horizon.

Given this situation, it is very difficult to continue to provide a light weight testing tool that works across 3 different versions of eclipse on 4 different platforms linux, windows and macosx(carbon/cocoa) while backporting APIs that only work on newer eclipse versions.

In light of this, I’m considering dropping support for eclipse 3.4 for future releases. I’m happy to assist anyone wanting to contribute efforts towards maintaining a release of SWTBot for Ganymede.

The v2.0.0.568 of SWTBot made last night would be the last that supports Ganymede.

My mom would rather use a mac over a gentoo. A systems admin would rather use redhat over a mac on a production machine.

It is also important to say “NO” to people who are not your users. Almost all software at eclipse.org are frameworks, tools and app servers written primarily for developers.

The way software and API is designed for the developer is different from how it’s developed for the non-developer (most of the times). SWTBot was originally and still is primarily a test-automation tool for use by QAs to automate test cases. The APIs are designed to be extremely intuitive, simple and easy to extend by QAs by merely looking at examples and not having to read API documentation.

Some context is in order if you haven’t had the opportunity to work closely with QAs before. Most QAs I’ve met understand customer requirements, understand the software and what the customers want out of it. I like to treat them as end users of the buggy software I build. They may not understand SWT threading, the eclipse ui and platform, OSGi and how TCP packets travel across the corporate firewall over to a load distributor in front of a cloud hosted at a datacenter on the other side of the continent. Try explaining a “org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Invalid thread access” to a QA and you’ll get interesting looks.

QAs are good at finding bugs in whatever software they are testing. Testing all of the software is time consuming, not to mention testing backward compatibility with older software. Nobody likes clicking around the same navigation path in the UI all the time.

QAs like exploring interesting ways to use the software and ensure that it works consistently as software evolves over time. The traditional favorites have been the ‘heavy weight’ automation tools like HP’s QTP, IBM’s Rational Robot, Borland’s SilkTest and the open source ‘light weight’ tools like selenium, sahi, and a lot others.

Each of these tools has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the most powerful features of each of these toolchains is the ability to author scripts in a dynamic language. The commercial vendors use vbscript or some other variant of the language, and provide some forms of integration with defect tracking tools. The open source tools are primarily light weight, use the languages like javascript, ruby, python and don’t integrate much with anything but your IDE and things like ant or rake.

The end goal is to make SWTBot an extremely good, open source, light weight tool for QAs to automate tests, and be just about useful for developers to write simple test cases with and not something in between that neither of them like.

As part of evolving SWTBot APIs we need to ensure that we stay true to our goal. This sometimes means saying NO to feature requests and even patches from developers if it hurts the non-developers.

Controlling complexity of your codebase by limiting what state your objects expose

The more objects that can see and change states on other objects, the more complex your system. Objects returning a boolean mean that someone calling that method will use an if branch, returning an integer would mean someone using if/else or switch/case. Returning objects would mean introspeting that returned object to invoke something else on it. This increases coupling between classes, makes code hard to read and test.

My class has 3 friends, I talk to my friends’ friends. My friends are difficult to mock, therefore mocking sucks…

… well, yeah!

Testing procedural code is hard. Testing such code generally involves setting up “data” and asserting on state of objects. Tell Don’t Ask code on the other hand is easier to test since you’re not testing state. Also notice how DI makes things simpler to test.

void testOwnerCanFeedDog(){
    Dog dog = new Dog();
    // have to create a mouth since owner calls dog.getMouth() to feed it
    Mouth mouth = new Mouth();
    dog.setMouth(mouth);
    PetOwner owner = new PetOwner();
    owner.setDog(dog);
    owner.feedDog(food);

    // verify that the dog gets the food (well the mouth, actually)
    assertEquals(food, mouth.getFood());
}

void testOwnerCanFeedDog(){
    Dog dog = mock(Dog.class);
    PetOwner owner = new PetOwner(dog);
    owner.feed(food);

    // verify that the dog gets the food
    verify(dog).feed(food);
}

Without Dependency Injection, testing is quite difficult; without Tell Don’t Ask, testing is almost always impossible. Put together, things are separated, testing is simplified.

Code is easier to read and maintain when objects are written in a Tell Don’t Ask.

“Tell, Don’t Ask” is a style of programming where anObject tells anotherObject to doSomething(), rather than asking anotherObject to getSomeValue() and then makeADecision().

Code that does violates this this is more procedural than it is object oriented. In the procedural world code is written to fetch some data (or state) and then make a decision or perform some action. Procedural programming “pulls data” into the logic to get things done.

In object oriented programming, we do the opposite — have objects do something for you instead of you doing it yourself. Don’t overdo this too much, someone still has to do the real work though

Identifying places where you may tell instead of ask:

class PetOwner{
    void feedDog(Food food){
        if(getDog().isHungry()){
            dog.getMouth().putFood(food);
        }
    }
}

This can instead be written as:

class PetOwner{
    void feedDog(Food food){
        dog.feed(food);
    }
}

class Dog{
    void feed(Food food){
        if (iAmHungry()){
            // consume food
        }
    }
}

Notice how the PetOwner does not know (or care to know) about the fact that the dog has a mouth.

How do I view code coverage for my functional tests?

Short answer:

Here’s how…. However, use it only for figuring out what functionality is not covered, not as a workaround for not having enough unit and integrations.

Having to use functional tests to determine percentage of code coverage is IMO a bad smell, avoid as much as possible.

Mariot Chauvin recently polished the initial contribution from David Green and released a version 0.1 of the gef support. We’re working towards integrating this as part of swtbot and you should hear more about it once the IP process is done

In this regard the users of swtbot are a bit special. Most of them understand testing and the principles associated with testing but do not necessarily understand swt, threading models and the workbench and platform internals. Getting such users to use eclipse, create test plugins and write tests in java involves more than just documentation and screenshots.

Mohammed recently posted two such 5 minute videos. Getting started with swtbot in under 5 minutes, and run your UI tests in a headless build from within ant.

A video is worth a thousand images