Re: Test Harnesses Meditation of Dissatisfaction

I'll go ahead and reply to myself, so folks get an idea of what I mean by this meditation.

I happen to know of a department in a company that uses a test harness written in Java. Except for heavy stress tests, can you guess which gets more CPU time: the test or the harness? Do I even have to tell you? When I asked why this dept was using a CPU heavy/Java test harness rather than one written (and written well, of course) in C, I was told (under the table) that long ago, it was a political decision! It would have hurt more people's feelings to choose the C one over the Java one!

OMG!

Comment on Re: Test Harnesses Meditation of Dissatisfaction

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Re^2: Test Harnesses Meditation of Dissatisfaction by perrin (Chancellor) on Mar 08, 2006 at 13:46 UTC
There's no reason that an efficient Java test harness couldn't be written. It sounds like the one one you have is just bloated and over-designed.	[reply]
Re^3: Test Harnesses Meditation of Dissatisfaction by jffry (Hermit) on Mar 08, 2006 at 15:30 UTC
Oh, you bet! In another dept in this same company, there is a test harness (coded in-house, of course) that is Java and isn't nearly so bad. In fact, it works rather well, so I'm told. However, this dept couldn't switch now without major upheavals, due to all the additional tools built to support and leverage it. Ug! Luckily, this dept. now has a good Java programmer on staff, so it is slowly getting better. The original coder wrote the test harness because he "wanted to learn Java." Oh, boy!	[reply]
Re^2: Test Harnesses Meditation of Dissatisfaction by adrianh (Chancellor) on Mar 09, 2006 at 10:29 UTC
When I asked why this dept was using a CPU heavy/Java test harness rather than one written (and written well, ot course) in C, I was told (under the table) that long ago, it was a political decision! It would have hurt more people's feelings to choose the C one over the Java one! Well if the code being tested is Java I'd go the Java route too. Keeping the testing framework and the code being tested in the same language usually makes things much easier. If I were you I'd just start things moving to one of the decent Java frameworks. TestNG is very nice, and the latest JUnit is pretty good too.	[reply]
Re^3: Test Harnesses Meditation of Dissatisfaction by jffry (Hermit) on Mar 27, 2006 at 23:52 UTC
I'll go ahead and suggest that our current test harness maintainer take a look at these Java test harnesses. Maybe he can get something useful from them. Again, I can't make major architectural decisions on the test harness. About the most I can do is request features if I can justify them. Although, in the next few years I might be able to make a case for those other Open Source harnesses you suggested. As for writing the tests in Java just because the harness is writen in Java, well, it doesn't really matter. The harness-to-test interface is language independent. It has it's own syntax, and coding in Java gains no added benefit. But thanks again for suggesting JUnit & TestNG. That may very well turn the corner for our dept in the years to come. I mean it. Sincerely.	[reply]