Adam Geras

A prototype empirical evaluation of test driven development

Test driven development (TDD) is a relatively new software development process. On the strength of anecdotal evidence and a number of empirical evaluations, TDD is starting to gain momentum as the primary means of developing software in organizations worldwide. In traditional development, tests are for verification and validation purposes and are built after the target product feature exists. In test-driven development, tests are used for specification purposes in addition to verification and validation. An experiment was devised to investigate the distinction between test-driven development and traditional, test-last development from the perspective of developer productivity and software quality. The results of the experiment indicate that while there is little or no difference in developer productivity in the two processes, there are differences in the frequency of unplanned test failures. This may lead to less debugging and more time spent on forward progress within a development project. As with many new software development technologies however, this requires further study, in particular to determine if the positive results translate into lower total costs of ownership.

Configuring hybrid agile-traditional software processes

The traditional versus agile project debate is most often represented in terms of polar positions of the life cycle – the process is either traditional or agile, waterfall or highly iterative. This may be effective in intellectual discussions, but it is highly unlikely to be useful to practitioners, especially those practitioners that are facing traditional project pressures and trying to find the “home ground” for their situation that will increase the likelihood that they will succeed. In this paper, we discuss extensions to Boehm and Turners five dimensions for determining a projects “home ground” – that is, the process configuration that might best fit the situation at hand. We have added dimensions to the basic framework provided by Boehm and Turner and have considered the process configuration question as a process itself and increased its scope to include both management and engineering key practice areas.

Making fit / fitnesse appropriate for biomedical engineering research

A prototype test driven development tool for embedded systems has been developed with hardware-oriented extensions to CPPUnitLite. However xUnit tests are written in the language of the solution; problematic in the development of biomedical instruments as the customer, the “doctor”, does not have “extensive knowledge of the domain”. The biomedical application is often prototyped within MATLAB before movement down to the “plumbing level” on a high-speed, highly parallel, processor to meet the requirement for real-time application in a safe and secure manner “in the surgical theatre” or “on the ward”. A long term research goal is an investigation of how to gain, as with standard business desktop system, the full advantage of using Fit and FitNesse as communication tools under these circumstances. We demonstrate the practical application of using indirection to permit a single set of Fit tests for both MATLAB and embedded system verification for a biomedical instrument.

Agile Development of Secure Web-Based Applications

This article outlines a four-point strategy for the development of secure Web-based applications within an agile development framework and introduces strategies to mitigate security risks commonly present in Web-based applications. The proposed strategy includes the representation of security requirements as test cases supported by the open source tool FIT, the deployment of a highly testable architecture allowing for security testing of the application at all levels, the outlining of an extensive security testing strategy supported by the open source unit-testing framework HTTPUnit, and the introduction of the novel technique of security refactoring that transforms insecure working code into a functionally equivalent secure code. Today, many Web-based applications are not secure, and limited literature exists concerning the use of agile methods within this domain. It is the intention of this article to further discussions and research regarding the use of an agile methodology for the development of secure Web-based applications.

Agile testing of location based services

Mobile applications are increasingly location-based; i.e. their functionality is becoming both interactive and context-aware. Combined with an overall increase in the complexity of the devices delivering such services, and a growth in the number of possible networks that they can participate in, these systems require more than just the average approach to testing. The principles and practices of agile testing may serve development teams well here; since the systems ultimately end up being developed and deployed in an iterative and evolutionary manner. In this paper, we explore a testing framework for location-based services that can be employed test-first and yet also offers the full range of non-functional tests that these applications require.