Bullet Proof User Interfaces slides
June 29, 2009
As I mentioned back here, my collegue, Jared MacDonald, also spoke at JavaOne 2009. Besides being an entertaining speaker, he delivered a great message about applying Test Driven Development (TDD) to user interface development. TDD is oft regarded as too difficult to apply in the UI space. Jared did a great job demonstrating why that’s simply not the case.
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Bullet Proof User Interface slides (PDF) |
Until next JavaOne!
Exploding Pixels 
July 5, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Congratulations. You’ve just spent three times as much time on that dialog as you should. And it probably won’t change for the life of the product, so your tests, once they pass, are 100% useless. And in the context of a product, you STILL don’t have 100% coverage, because there will be all these failure cases in the caller code some of which your unit tests won’t ever hit because they’re too simplistic and optimistic.
I’m not against unit testing for complex pieces of code, but simple pieces can do without it just fine. And TDD is a waste of time. And you still need a QA org because once deadline draws near developers will start cutting corners.
July 6, 2009 at 8:30 am
Think of it as a component that was written, fully tested and can be reused!
July 10, 2009 at 7:27 am
Have you tried frankenstein [ http://www.slideshare.net/vivek_prahlad/functional-testing-swing-applications-with-frankenstein ] ?
it even has record-playback to make writing acceptance test easier.
July 10, 2009 at 10:35 am
I hadn’t seen this — it definitely looks interesting.
-Ken
July 13, 2009 at 6:31 am
It was built by a couple of ThoughtWorkers (http://www.thoughtworks.com/) when they couldn’t find a good way to write acceptance tests for swing apps. If you’re interested, I could put you in touch. :)
July 13, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Saager,
This is Jared (the presentation author). I hadn’t seen that tool — it looks compelling! I have a lot of respect for what comes out of the ThoughtWorks — Uncle Bob’s piece on applying TDD to bowling scores was one of my early inspirations!
Thanks again,
Jared
July 16, 2009 at 10:16 pm
[…] Ken Orr lets everyone know that a co-worker of his, Jared MacDonald, spoke at JavaOne on building bullet proof user interfaces using test-driven development. The slides (in pdf form) are available for download. […]