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How about these to name just a few?

• ASP.NET MVC
• Castle Project
• NHibernate
• NAnt
• NUnit
• CruiseControl
• TortoiseSVN
• DotNetNuke

Plus tons more available on:

• CodePlex
• CodeProject
• Sourceforge

I don't see any reason why you can't get some programming experience while working on QA. You should at least be able to get read access to the code of the projects you are working on. When you find bugs during you QA work try tracking them down and/or writing unit tests for them. Depending on what languages are used there, you should probably get to know JUnit or NUnit or search for other testing frameworks that might be relevant to your project. Then create a patch with the test and attach that to the issue. It will make the developer's life easier and prevent the issue from occurring again later. Obviously, not all test can be easily automated, but you're bound to find a few along the way.

If you're able to create an automated test for the issue, the next step is to see if you can fix it yourself. If you sumbit a few unit tests with fixes, the development team will probably start thinking about hiring you if/when an opening comes up. If openings do not come up within a year or two, then at least you have gained some good experience that can be used during interviews, or to help out one of the many open source projects that desperately need better automated tests.

Good advice. Mod parent up. From a technology perspective, a Version Control System, Test Driven Development, and Continuous Integration can go a long way towards improving quality. If the OP is in a MSFT shop, then you are most probably stuck with VSS or TFS. VSS is file based so it is not very good for distributed development. You will need to enhance VSS with SoS if you have remote developers. TFS doesn't have that problem and also has support for TDD's unit testing. If the OP is willing to use OSS, then there are plenty of good options available. There is plenty of good advice here as to OSS VCS. There are various unit testing frameworks for Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, C++, you name it. Also, check out Cruise Control for Continuous Integration.

Technology alone cannot solve quality issues, however. Changes in methodology, process, and even corporate culture may also be needed. Take a look at my site for more advice on that.

Yes, I'm perfectly aware of the limitations of the Express version as well as of the cost of the professional versions. While not as rich on features as its siblings, the Express versions are in fact rather powerful. If you really can't do with the Express version, then you're most likely a professional developer and the $700 per license won't matter anyway.

Yes, as the Jamie Cansdale story illustrates, the license is not without restrictions. Btw. if I remember the story right Jamie Cansdale was selling a unit test add-in for the Express version - I'm slightly puzzled though, the Express version works nicely with the NUnit framework which is open source and free. As a matter of fact, there's a lot of open source build tools developed for VS that'll work nicely with the Express edition, e.g. NAnt and CruiseControl.NET (I'll leave it to you to do the google'ing).

Ah, you're one of these googler-linkers, where you find a post, pick out tiny things, take 2 minutes to google it, and then post a link, as if to prove a point.

Eh? No. I was just somewhat puzzled by the "insightful" moderation (quite a lot puzzled actually) and chose to comment on a few of the points where we obviously disagree, providing links to relevant information in case you actually cared.

I really don't know why I'm trying to explain it to you; I don't live in your black and white world.

QFT :)

• JUnit
• NUnit
• PhpUnit (I think there are multiple versions)
• Php SimpleTest

As a programmer, I say a voting machine should never eat a vote silently. Votes are easy math: cast_votes++
The machine should provide feedback that a vote has been accepted and counted, otherwise make it clear this did not happen. Somebody should at least pull out some simple unit testing. http://nunit.org/

I for one would love to know more about the tools they use for automated testing.

In my company, we have a build & testing server running compiler and NUnit tests for all data-layer tests (complete tests like "load all of everything" and more specific tests like "authorise user with known bad credentials - expect login-failure") alongside NUnitForms tests for the application-layer (random, frantic clicking's everywhere and specific user-journey tests).

All in all, it's quite a good system for rooting out the majority of bugs, but I'm always looking for ways of improving this side of things.

I can only imagine Microsoft must use similar techniques, but obviously a tad more intensive; can anyone shed any light?

Ah, but Nunit is open source isn't it?

http://www.nunit.org/

If this project has them, I would also make sure to examine the output of unit tests http://www.nunit.org/ . If the project does not have these, then I would recommend checking it out. The one advantage to using the approach of unit testing, is that once you develop a test to produce the buggy behavior, it then becomes possible to test for this behavior at a later date (regression errors). In addition the debugger built into Visual Studio .Net is quite powerful once you get used to it (and with VS 2005 it has only gotten more powerful). Even if your project is not written for the 2.0 framework/2005 specifically, it still may be useful to debug it in 2005.

One area that I would shy away from if you could help it is if you need to debug the interactions between two servers, is the remote debugging tools for debugging remote servers. I tried using these at work, and spent close to 5 hours on that particular Rat Hole.

Couldn't a .NET developer use NUnit and TestDriven to accomplish many of the test-driven development tasks?

Blame it on JUnit. Since it provides a way to make unit testing easier, it's easier to get people to actually do it.

Don't forget NUnit, which allows JUnit-style unit tests to be constructed for .NET applications. I have no idea how many .NET developers actually use it, though.

http://www.nunit.org/

Then, read Marc Clifton's series on Advanced Unit Testing in C#. The code is easily ported to VB.Net, as well, although not required. I am working on introducing the practices outlined in the article where I am currently employed.

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/autp1.asp
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/autp2.asp
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/autp3.asp
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/autp4.asp

As if CodeProject wasn't slow enough. The readthroughs on this post should bring it to its knees in no time at all. If you have a chance, look at some of Marc's other postings, as well. Very high quality stuff.

In regards to Unit Testing in general, I don't know why it isn't given more weight in college coursework. Honestly, it would make a great course, or series of courses. I've been out of school for just a wee bit though, so maybe some are offering it already. ;-)

I only use assertions in unit test code such as here and here.

There's also Nant, which implements the Ant build system, and Nunit, which is a .net implementation of the Junit java unit testing framework. I'l still sticking with Java though because I get to use Eclipse and Resin. It doesn't hurt that all these open source packages come out for Java first either.

Well, we have an automated build system that is, with the exception of SourceSafe, completely free.

The .NET Framework SDK 1.1 providers all the compilers, resource generators, etc. Completely free from MS.

We use SourceSafe for version control. Though there are free alternatives out there.

We use Draco.NET to fire off builds automatically, and to give reports of the builds via an XML file and e-mail.

We use NAnt for build workflow. As well as the version and record tasks from NAntContrib.

We use VB.Doc to rip XML comments out of any VB code, and NDoc to take all the XML comments and create MSDN-style developer documentation.

We use NUnit for our automated unit testing. We currently use NUnit2Report to make the XML test case results into pretty reports, but we might just write a utility to combine all the documents ourself and just use XSL to do the transforms.

Last, we use InstallShield to create installer projects, but you could use Wix or something else to make them for free.

To test the 1.0 version of mono after installing it, I attempted to run an nunit test of a middleware assembly (no GUI) that I coded for the ISV that I work for. The test runs without mishap using Microsoft's VM but crashes when using the mono VM.

I get this message (with different line numbers) 2863 times.

CRITICAL **: file metadata.c: line 798 (mono_metadata_string_heap): assertion `index < meta->heap_strings.size' failed

CRITICAL **: file metadata.c: line 826 (mono_metadata_blob_heap): assertion `index < meta->heap_blob.size' failed

"Refactoring" - holy fuck, where do you get suck words?

I get a lot of those words by actively thinking about what I'm doing, and making sure I keep current by actively researching the subject.

Such actions could've saved your business 1.5 months and at least $10,000 (assuming the QA people are American). You might've wanted to go to google and type ".net unit testing framework". That would lead you to NUnit... which happens to be "a framework for running tests in C# (or any other .NET language). It automatically discovers test cases via Reflection API, allows to group them into suites, run suites, generate reports, debug." Plus, it's free, written, debugged, and supported by people your organization doesn't have to pay.

It's interesting that you used the term "dogfooding", which I'd say is even less intuitive than "refactoring". I take it you relied on someone else to teach that term to you? You are aware that it's a word that Microsoft announces with much fanfare that they do?