Test driven scripting - half day tutorial
2009-03-23 (08.30 - 12.30) Emily Bache, IBS JavaSolutions:
Most programmers at some time or another find they write little scripts to help with everyday tasks. In the excellent book "the Pragmatic Programmer" the advice is to achieve "ubiquitous automation", where all these little scripts work together seamlessly and let you concentrate on more important matters. I'm thinking of little tasks like cleaning up old files, transferring built artifacts to test servers, and augmenting the build with extra steps. Small boring tasks that you don't want to expend valuable brain cycles on.
My experience is that these kinds of scripts can distract you with trivial errors and regression problems. In the best case they steal time and in the worst case jeopardize your delivery. "But that one line change couldn't possibly corrupt the contents of the deploy folder!" Of course not.
Tools like xUnit are often clumsy to use in these situations, since scripts almost invariably modify files and use external utilities like grep. The best tool I know of for testing all kinds of scripts is TextTest (http://texttest.org), so that will be the focus of the tutorial. We will practice getting existing scripts under test, and learn how to set up test data and options. We will test drive new features, and test for regression. There will be demonstrations and opportunities to practice what you have learnt.
Target audience:
Programmers and system administrators who work on the command line, write scripts and manage build systems or suchlike. If possible, bring your own laptop, (the exercises are designed to work on windows or unix). If possible install python 2.5, pygtk and TextTest beforehand, although I'll help you get that set up on the day if necessary. If you havn't got a laptop, let me know and hopefully you can pair with someone who does. Python knowledge is useful but not required.
Registration:
To register, please send an email directly to
The fee for this tutorial is 2.000 SEK. If you attend both tutorials IBS JavaSolutions is running on March 23, the fee to attend both tutorials are 3.500 SEK