Nat Pryce, Author of "Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests" and developer of the jMock mock-object library.

After completing his PhD at Imperial College, Nat Pryce joined a dot-com just in time to ride the bust. Since then he has worked as a programmer, architect, trainer, and consultant in a variety of industries, including sports reportage, marketing communications, retail, telecoms, and finance. He has also worked on academic research projects and does occasional university teaching. An early adopter of XP, he has written or contributed to several open source libraries and tools that support TDD and was one of the founding organizers of the London XP Day conference. He also regularly presents at international conferences. Nat is based in London, UK.

Presentation: "Test-Driven Development of Asynchronous Systems"

Track: How do you test that?

Time: Friday 10:30 - 11:30

Location: Westminster Suite

Abstract:

The presentation describes what I learned on several past projects applying test-driven development to distributed systems with message-oriented middleware, REST web services and user interfaces written with AJAX and Swing.

The test frameworks for these projects have a common architectural style, which can be applied to testing any system that has concurrent or asynchronous behaviour.

The presentation describes some common problems encountered when testing concurrent systems, and how those problems can be addressed with some simple testing idioms.

Keywords: Testing, distributed systems, concurrency, message-oriented middleware, ajax, rich client

Target audience: developers and testers with experience of writing automated tests