 The VCAPS project at Ford
used the unit test framework for both unit tests and acceptance
tests. At the time it seemed like the simplest thing that could possibly
work. But in order to use the more generic unit test framework we
had to hand code large amounts of data. That is, our database was created with := (assignment) statements. The
result was that it required someone familiar with the acceptance test data to update it or add new data and tests.
I had noticed that it was
difficult. But continued on anyway. That was my mistake, we needed to create a tool to maintain our tests. A custom
made, domain specific tool that would aid us and our customers in creating acceptance tests. My excuse was that
there was never enough time to create it. We probably spent even more time creating test data the hard way. |
Now a couple years later
VCAPS has entered the maintenance part of it's life cycle. The acceptance tests are still being used to find integration
bugs, but no new tests are being added. What the maintenance people are finding is that it is nearly impossible
to add new acceptance tests and hard to maintain the ones that exist without some sort of tool designed to make
all that data easy to handle.
The best thing we could
have done for our project was to just go ahead and create the tool early on. In retrospect it would have been far
simpler to have such a tool. Creating the tool would have helped us and saved us time over the entire life cycle
of the project. 
eXPerience Software |
