Re: [platform-core-dev] Testability experiment

["John Arthorne" <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I think your lack of response on this is because your scenario is very artificial.  We don't write tests for individual classes, we write tests for units of functionality.  Typically this functionality spans several classes, and it doesn't make any sense to test the parts individually.  In fact, most of the classes you list don't really have any isolated behaviour that you can test. For example, StoredObject is an abstract class.  NodeInfo is just a data structure with accessor methods.  MissingBuilder is a nested class that can't be tested outside the context of its enclosing instance.CollectSyncStatusVisitor can't be tested without also testing the corresponding "accept" methods.  Testing an exception in isolation (IndexedStoreException) also doesn!
 't make sense.  If you insisted on an ordering despite this artificiality, I'd probably use some source-based metric like file size or method count to order them.  This would either give hollow validation of your theoretical results, or contradict them for no good reason.
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Magiel Bruntink <magiel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent by: platform-core-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx 05/13/2003 11:37 AM Please respond to platform-core-dev

To:        platform-core-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx         cc:                 Subject:        [platform-core-dev] Testability experiment

Dear Eclipse developers,

Currently I am researching into the topic of software testability as part of
my master's project. In order to validate some theoretical results, I'de like
to perform an experiment. If you can spare some of your time,
your participation in this experiment will be greatly appreciated.

First let me explain a few things about my research. The topic of my thesis
is testability of software, but for now the focus is on object-oriented software,
and more specifically Java. I am examining if there is some relation between
source-based metrics and effort required to test the components of a system.

The experiment consists of the following: I have selected a number of classes
of a specific Eclipse sub-project (of the 2.1 release branch). These classes
are listed below, in no particular order. I would like to ask you the following:
Rank the classes in ascending order of effort that you think would be needed to
develop a test suite for each particular class.

It is important to keep in mind that a major factor of effort estimation is the
availability of tools (f.e. JUnit) and the organization of the project. For this
reason I'de like you to take the Eclipse project and its available tools as a
starting point for your estimates.

Many thanks in advance!

Magiel Bruntink,
magiel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
mbruntnk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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selected classes for the core.resources subproject:

org.eclipse.core.internal.dtree.NodeInfo
org.eclipse.core.internal.events.BuildManager.MissingBuilder
org.eclipse.core.internal.events.ResourceComparator
org.eclipse.core.internal.indexing.IndexedStoreException
org.eclipse.core.internal.indexing.LogReader
org.eclipse.core.internal.indexing.StoredObject
org.eclipse.core.internal.localstore.CollectSyncStatusVisitor
org.eclipse.core.internal.localstore.SafeFileOutputStream
org.eclipse.core.internal.properties.PropertyStore
org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.SaveManager
org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.Workspace
org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.WorkspaceTreeReader_2
org.eclipse.core.internal.watson.ElementTreeReader


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