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Codign Software has upgraded its CoViewDeveloper and CoViewManager testing tools. According to Codign, the new release lets developers improve code testability with or without unit testing.

Codign's Joe Ponczak explained to Dr. Dobb's that, based on his experience, developers want to unit test, but often don't have time. The concept of code "testability", therefore, is to help developers write testable code, so that future bug fixing and refactoring efforts are easier. Ponczak went on to say that Codign's approach is unique in that Codign does not want to be the judge and jury on how testable someone's code is -- that's a role best left to developers. Consequently with Codign's plug-ins, developers can pick their metrics, thresholds, and severity levels. CoView can tell developers what methods/classes/packages exceed the thresholds in real time via syntax-like decorators, with the intent being that it is better to deal with these problems early on -- even if you don't unit test. This approach has proved particularly useful, said Ponczak, for junior-level programmers or offshore development teams.

For JUnit tests, CoView helps design and create the test cases by figuring out all the paths through a method. In theory, developers should have one test case per path. In reality, that is hard to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. With CoView, says Ponczak, at least you can see your paths and unit test the ones you want. CoView provides wizards that either create most of the unit test, or in some circumstances, the entire unit test. You would then have to update the assertion to match the path.

CoView provides branch coverage and path coverage, and supports Eclipse, Junit, and JDK.

"The goal of any unit testing program is to better design, develop and deliver high quality, maintainable code," says Ponczak. "With the CoView family, organizations can easily and inexpensively improve code quality, help inexperienced developers code better, and gain insight in offshore development efforts."

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