AgitarOne: Unit Tests For Old Code



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December 1, 2006 —  By now, every good developer knows that unit testing is of primary importance to the development process. However, Jerry Rudisin, CEO and president of Agitar Software, said that there’s one area of development that is perpetually left out of the unit testing tumult: inherited code.

“One of the things that got in the way of people [trying to do unit testing] has been the fact that they had this really nasty mass of legacy code written in Java that they knew they wanted to start modifying and enhancing, but they didn’t want to touch it because they had no unit tests for it,” said Rudisin.

To address the situation, Agitar in mid-November released AgitarOne, a new product that includes all of Agitar’s previous software offerings mixed together with server-side JUnit test generation.

“Unleash AgitarOne on your legacy code, and it will go through and generate a good set of JUnit tests,” Rudisin said. “They’re not as good as hand-generated JUnit tests on original code, but they serve as a really useful set of regression tests.”

AgitarOne includes all of Agitator 3.0’s standard features: a dashboard for viewing code coverage, support for exploratory testing and code standards enforcement. But AgitarOne’s server-side approach to the testing process brings some new abilities to the mix. For starters, AgitarOne automatically installs the open-source tool Ant to give developers the ability to do continuous integration testing.

But the real reason for running AgitarOne on the server and not on the desktop, said Rudisin, is that the product’s automated test generation is very CPU-intensive. Thus, off-loading automated JUnit test generation onto the server frees up desktops to deal with standard daily tasks. Rudisin added that AgitarOne is capable of utilizing multiple CPUs and servers for its computations.

A standard installation of AgitarOne costs around US$50,000, said Rudisin. The server-side tool is accessed through Eclipse plug-ins, which are included in the product. Developers simply install the AgitarOne plug-in, and are then able to add unit tests through the Eclipse project view. Tests can be generated on a small scale—testing a single class—or a large scale—testing an entire project. All of these tests are generated from scratch as needed.

And while the tests generated by AgitarOne will never be better than hand-coded unit tests written at the same time tested code is completed, the tool automatically generates its tests based on the user’s desired code coverage requirements. That, said Rudisin, means code with absolutely no unit tests can be 70 percent covered from top to bottom with only a few mouse clicks and some dedicated server-side CPU time.





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