Re: Re: System testing a WWW transaction application

There are some difference between FunctionalTests (aka AcceptanceTests) and UnitTests. Idea of unit tests is that they are written by programmer and they test isolated pieces of program while functional tests are implemented by other party (for example QA stuff) and they test whole application. It is important difference!

The purpose of functional and unit tests is different and they are implemented by different people. Obviously they need different tools. Test::MockObject is useful in unit testing but it is wrong tool for functional testing (and this is what about dragonchild is asking).

--
Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)

Comment on Re: Re: System testing a WWW transaction application

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Re^3: System testing a WWW transaction application by dws (Chancellor) on Jul 24, 2002 at 16:12 UTC
Functional Tests are a different beast than Unit Tests, though if you don't have effective Unit Testing, jumping in to Functional (or Acceptance) Testing is like catching rain in buckets when you should have patched the holes in the roof first.	[reply]
Re: Re^3: System testing a WWW transaction application by IlyaM (Parson) on Jul 24, 2002 at 16:43 UTC
I'd say they are quite independant. Ideally you need both of them but in reallity it is better to have some tests rather not having them at all. If I were dragonchild I would teach QA-staff to use some non-programmer friendly tool (<shameless plug>HTTP::WebTest</shameless plug>) and ask them to start writting functional tests. Conserning unit tests: when you have big pile of cra^H^Hcode it is hard to implement missing unit tests at once. In most cases you have no time and/or motivation to do this work. However it is not hard and IMHO sufficient to start writting unit tests for all new or changed code. -- Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)	[reply]