Pushing the envelope

Was graciously given permission by my current (for the next 2 days) employer to open-source some utility stuff I'd written while there. Expect the following imminently, pending some minor cleanup:-

• TestGenerator - recursively scans all java source code in a package and generates an AllTests TestSuite class. Simple, but useful.
• JScaffold (working title) - Initially developed as a means to mock up a servlet container for testing servlets, but generally useful anywhere hard-to-create interfaces (such as HttpServletRequest) are used. Similar in design to EasyMock, but less concerned with assertions about how the mock objects are called, and more with faking up a convincing environment to persuade servlets to render their output into an easy to handle object like a ByteArrayOutputStream or String which can then be checked using tools like Jakarta Regexp. Useful for high-level testing.

...is surprisingly hard to do. Yesterday I got fed up enough at trying to figure out whether our stats-gathering code was working to actually write a script to generate an artificial sample of perfect data. It took me about 20 minutes. When I'd finished I showed it to a colleague and she said "Why did no-one think of this until now?" I had no answer. If anyone should have thought of it, it should have been me. It seemed so obvious a thing to do, once I actually got irritated enough to sit down and do it. Up until then we'd been doing our testing using real data. More life-like? Yes, but impossible to verify automatically. If the system claims 15,768 occurrences of 'x' in a total sample size of 28 million, how do you know it is right? Check by hand?

Automated repeatable tests. Such a small amount of effort for such a huge gain.