Acceptance Testing Results

At the beginning of the presentation (or the end, depending on how you want to look at it), I had people write things down on notecards for me. Here's a compilation of the results from the live presentation (names omitted to protect the guil-, er, innocent). Sorry if the numbers don't totally match up... entering info off of index cards is a bit tedious.

1. How long you've been programming:
   • 4 years - 2
   • 5 years - 2
   • 6 years - 2
   • 9 years - 1
   • 10 years - 3
   • 11 years - 1
   • 13 years - 1
   • 15 years - 2
   • 16 years - 2
   • 19 years - 1
   • 20 years - 5
   • 21 years - 1
   • 23 years - 1
   • 24 years - 1
   • 27 years - 1
   • 29 years - 1
   • 40 years - 1
2. Your experience with unit testing, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being very inexperienced, and 5 being very experienced:
   1. 5 people
   2. 12 people
   3. 4 people
   4. 4 people
   5. 4 people
3. What you feel you still need to learn about unit testing:
   • Jargon
   • Lots
   • Automated unit testing
   • Everything
   • How to test temporally-coupled code
   • How to make unit testing easier in mixed language environments (C, C++, Ruby, Python, etc.)
   • How do I know my tests are correct?
   • Further details of doing it, also just more projects where I use it.
   • Tools - RubyUnit, Lapidary, etc. Comparisons?
   • Finding the "right" levels where to mock and where not (or is there no "right" level?)
   • Better practices (execution) of unit tests to existing non-tested code.
   • Very much
   • Yes
   • I need to learn how to write good unit tests, e.g. any standard approaches to it. I know, e.g., the JUnit and RubyUnit API's and the mechanics of it all, but the tests I write seem kind of lame.
   • Guidelines - what is reasonable or sufficient?
   • Unfamiliar with the term...
   • Ways of handling difficult areas - strategies for db, comms, 3rd party libraries, etc.
   • Almost everything! How to write, execute, evaluate, catalog, build test frameworks, how to make the unit tests accurate, thorough...
   • How do you unit-test I/O elements (network connections, classes that read from sockets, server frameworks, etc.)
   • How to build complex algorithms test first
   • Get experience with unit testing frameworks
   • More formalized techniques
   • More about using Mock Objects
   • Discipline to test boundary conditions
   • Ability to convince others
   • A lot more
   • How to make it practical

Copyright (c) 2001 by Nathaniel Talbott. All Rights Reserved.