Available!

We are happy to announce that DevRiot for Visual Studio 200X(Beta) is available for downloading at:

http://efekctive.com/beta_public/

The documentation can be found at:

http://efekctive.com/docs/

Don't forget you will need a working email address, a working internet connection, and a SQL Server instance available to install and use DevRiot (the email address is required during setup only)

We hope you find it useful and worth the time to try it! If you have any questions please contact us at this address: beta at efekctive dot com.

ISB

I hope it is useful!!!

500,000 and counting...

The Suite serialization is slowly starting. I am polishing some performance features.

But I wanted share with the latest readers some of the brute-force finesse of the tool:

500,000 tests, no coding, no wasted time. Enjoy.

Visual Threading!!

This is another progress demo with assertions, out-of-scope verifications, multiple threads were involved in a series of tests. Not a single line of code was written.

Try to achieve the same with other technology: Microsoft's, etc. See how much time it takes you to achieve the same. Then check how much more time it takes to get the results back.

How do you want to spend your time and budget? :-}

Context Adjustments...

Some times it is amazing where pointers to adjust features can come from.

And I have to say that MS seems to be on the ball supporting the extensibility community (not related to previous line)

Anyways, DevRiot's UI has changed a little bit to make things easier on inherited methods,fine tunning runs and having multiple instances of VS up.

We wanted to get this stable before get into the gui testing engine for .Net compact and device integration. It is going to be fun :-}

P.S. The second "Run Current Tests" really runs the whole suite.

What an eye sore!! (102,796)

Well, I finally managed to download all the components for Visual Studio 2008. It was long a process because of the size of the archives involved. Regardless, I have to say that the process was smooth.

Now to the substance, comparing DevRiot and the test tools of VS 2008.

I started with the basic: take an int and return it.

Nothing else fancier where DevRiot has advantage over VS: gui testing (on PC and devices, on and off screen), dynamic array/data structure manipulation, dynamic build test tress, built-in load and stress testing, etc :-}

It is an eye sore: test projects, test types, test attributes, test contexts, asserts, clicks, clacks to get to the point of to modify the test source to add the only thing that is of interest to the user: desired input and expected output. That is all a user needs. If the user needs to add a second test: repeat the process :-}

The thing is dog slow. It took (on average) 102,796 times more ticks than DevRiot. Granting that I was using Virtual PC but the times I am using for DevRiot are from 4 years ago on much slower machine than the current one I own.

If we assume a 50 times handicap (meaning that a 5000% improvement) DevRiot is still around 2000 times faster.

No wonder the execution time report is not the default one.

I tried to mess MS tool with changing return types, it choked like a child. Then I tried exceptions or even setting scenarios. It would have required getting into coding, api, etc..

I do not think they have clear concept of what automation means.

So, bottom line: why spend more time using MS QA infrastructure if it is not going to yield faster development cycles?

The pricing structure and road map discussion, I will leave for other post.

Progress in General:

Here we have a couple of the .Net tool working with generics:

It is funny how monitoring works. A big portion of the traffic drops, and then hits on the whitepapers and J2ME topics surge. And then a big portion of the traffic is back.

Off-topic:

Well, one thing led to the next. It started with using .Net 3.0 and the GUI testing engine, and ended up in: "we need to make sure that the off-screen engine works".

The off-screen engine is a feature of the GUI testing engine that allows these type of tests to run at speeds close to that of the unit test engine. The main goal is to increase the throughput of the process without losing accuracy.

BTW, it works...

Generics 3.0...

Adding support for generics is well underway but trying the GUI testing engine with WPF?

Help needs to be local, msdn needs to be installed...

Ohh well!

One-click assert!

This is another of the progress snapshots: one click assert.

This feature allows the user to easily set the expected value, or range of values that an object should have. In this context a null or not null return value.

It does not matter if the object is private to a private field: just click away and forget about typing Asserts, PrivateObjects, or any of those rudimentary approaches!

Prototipo; fundamentals, what fundamentals

The VS tool is coming along smoothly but a little bit slow. Phurnace's project has been quite interesting: started with a prototype with an rcp front-end and has turned into a WebSphere process server, web-services thing.

I have to admit that is highly interesting.

In this astonishing summer of news, there was this particular one about onshoring on cnn: an indian company was offshoring to Ohio some call center operations because the lower wages were not enough.

If the process and where economic value is created are not understood, there is little chance to success by trying anything else...

50 to 80 Marketing

Well, between working on DevRiot for VS 2005 and my friends' RCP project, I am having time to compare the two most used IDEs in the market.

It amazes me how the new bells and whistles added over time to these IDEs address so little the costs that are crippling most software shops. Testing and debugging shared 50% of the costs of a software project back when the first edition of the MMM came out. Now the same pair share up to 80% of the costs of a software project (according to NIST figures)

It is nice to have code-completion to the max but how does that reduce that 80%?

It seems that the game is about who messes things up the least, instead of who improves things the most.

Beta FAQ:

A few questions have come up:

Do you Support Swing?

Yes. Actually, we are far along in that regard. We just wanted to release something that worked in J2SE and J2ME uniformly.

Swing is not an official J2ME package so we decided to remove it from the release.

How does the Private members access work?

Think of it as Visual Studio's PrivateObject but on steriods. And for Eclipse, too.

It is always there working for the user. But the user does not know it. The feature is transparent and does not require coding. It is also immune to refactoring changes.

It also works for all the types involved in a test (gui or unit): parameters, fields.

It also works like a drill: the user can click into an object state as deep as needed.

Is it only the plug-in/add-in?

No. The plug-in/add-in has two things in it: the plug-in/add-in logic and the reduced version of the engine. The plan would be to provide an automation server where the output of the plug-ins/add-ins are consumed and value added stats are gathered.

This could be provided as a service or as an attachement to SCM.

600+ Faster

As we polish the new architecture in .Net, we decided to compare the execution speeds of Nunit 2.4 and DevRiot.

DevRiot is still cookin!! Just considering the overall times, not the average, DevRiot is in the order of 600+ times faster. Plus it is also a GUI testing engine that runs in Windows as well as PocketPC.

Why do we consider this important? Testing and quality represents a huge percentage, according to NIST it could reach 80%, of a given project costs. Vista is another example of this efficiency problem.

The startling thing is very few, if any, high-tech strategy courses or implementations really address this. So which kind of strategy ignores altogether 80% of the problem?

A former, I think, SAP CEO mentioned the software industry needs to copy the auto industry. McKinsey & Co has written articles about it too. Microsoft Research aims in that direction also. But the facts seem to say something else. Just a look at the different internet forums will confirm this.

So if we want to improve the situation we need to use the scarce human time in more efficient ways, and let the computers use their cycles in something useful.

Anyways enough ramblings, here is the snapshot of DevRiot .Net