I've just read a whole bunch about Test Driven Design, automated unit 
testing, xUnit, JUnit, Quest's code testing tool (at $595 a pop, or some 
such....eek!) , utPLSQL, pl/unit, and PLUTO. Whew!

Has anyone had any experience with any of the above, either the TDD idea 
in general or any of the specific tools/frameworks alleged to make it 
all better?

What sage advice can be had from those in the trenches before me?

Our people would be coding in pl/sql, of course.

Lee <Lee@Jamtoday.com> writes:

> I've just read a whole bunch about Test Driven Design, automated unit
> testing, xUnit, JUnit, Quest's code testing tool (at $595 a pop, or some
> such....eek!) , utPLSQL, pl/unit, and PLUTO. Whew!
>
> Has anyone had any experience with any of the above, either the TDD idea in
> general or any of the specific tools/frameworks alleged to make it all
> better?
>
> What sage advice can be had from those in the trenches before me?
>
> Our people would be coding in pl/sql, of course.
>

Yep. I looked at a few. Most of them werre overly complex for what I
needed. 

In the end, I grabbed PLUTO and played with it for a while. It is
simple, but provides pretty much all you need. However, I found a number
of problems with it and a few bugs. I think it wold be fair to classify
PLUTO as a proof of concept rather than a finished or under development
solution. 

In the end, I pretty much stole the basic ideas in PLUTO and
re-implemented  - its actually quite small. There are still some rough
edges, but everyone using it has found it is useful for meeting our TDD
needs. There are a number of things I want to improve, but just now,
getting the job done has priority. 

It took me about 2 days to re-implement PLUTO, including a couple of
extensions that made what we are doing a bit easier. The one thing we
have given up using at present is PLUTO's ability to dynamically
generate the run_tests procedure. While this is a nice feature, we found
on a larger RAC based system that having PLUTO dynamically generate the
run_tests procedure when you execute your test made it really really
slow. For now, developers must write and maintain their own run_tests
method. 

Apart from that, it pretty much provides the necessary scaffolding  that
is useful in getting a standardised set of unit tests. It is very
similar to junit for Java or Perl's simple Testharness stuff. anyone
familiar with either of these should have no problems. 

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au