软件说明：

XUnit test patterns : refactoring test code / Gerard Meszaros.

ISBN-13: 978-0-13-149505-0 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-13-149505-4
1. Software patterns. 2. Computer software—Testing. I. Title.
QA76.76.P37M49 2007
005.1—dc22
2006103488
Copyright ? 2007 Pearson Education, Inc.


If you go to junit.org, you’ll see a quote from me: “Never in the fi eld of software
development have so many owed so much to so few lines of code.” JUnit has
been criticized as a minor thing, something any reasonable programmer could
produce in a weekend. This is true, but utterly misses the point. The reason JUnit
is important, and deserves the Churchillian knock-off, is that the presence of this
tiny tool has been essential to a fundamental shift for many programmers: Testing
has moved to a front and central part of programming. People have advocated it
before, but JUnit made it happen more than anything else.
It’s more than just JUnit, of course. Ports of JUnit have been written for lots
of programming languages. This loose family of tools, often referred to as xUnit
tools, has spread far beyond its java roots. (And of course the roots weren’t really
in Java—Kent Beck wrote this code for Smalltalk years before.)
xUnit tools, and more importantly their philosophy, offer up huge opportunities
to programming teams—the opportunity to write powerful regression test
suites that enable teams to make drastic changes to a code-base with far less risk;
the opportunity to re-think the design process with Test Driven Development.
But with these opportunities come new problems and new techniques. Like
any tool, the xUnit family can be used well or badly. Thoughtful people have
fi gured out various ways to use xUnit, to organize the tests and data effectively.
Like the early days of objects, much of the knowledge to really use the tools
is hidden in the heads of its skilled users. Without this hidden knowledge you
really can’t reap the full benefi ts.
It was nearly twenty years ago when people in the object-oriented community
realized this problem for objects and began to formulate an answer. The
answer was to describe their hidden knowledge in the form of patterns. Gerard
Meszaros was one of the pioneers in doing this. When I fi rst started exploring
patterns, Gerard was one of the leaders that I learned from. Like many in the
patterns world, Gerard also was an early adopter of eXtreme Programming,
and thus worked with xUnit tools from the earliest days. So it’s entirely logical
that he should have taken on the task of capturing that expert knowledge in the
form of patterns.
I’ve been excited by this project since I fi rst heard about it. (I had to launch
a commando raid to steal this book from Bob Martin because I wanted it to grace my series instead.) Like any good patterns book it provides knowledge
to new people in the fi eld, and just as important, provides the vocabulary and
foundations for experienced practitioners to pass their knowledge on to their
colleagues. For many people, the famous Gang of Four book Design Patterns
unlocked the hidden gems of object-oriented design. This book does the same
for xUnit.
Martin Fowler
Series Editor
Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks