Book Outline

This page describes the organization of the upcoming book of which this website is acting as a preview. It can be used to read the web site in "book order". For a more visual representation of the goals, principles, smells and patterns, please refer to Book Outline Diagrams.

Table of Contents

Introductory Material

• Preface
• Introduction
• Refactoring A Test

The Narratives

The narrative chapters introduce the concepts that are covered in more detail in the reference section. The concepts are introduced in context along with the obvious alternatives.

• the A Brief Tour narrative
• the Test Smells narrative
• the Goals of Test Automation narrative
• the Philosophy Of Test Automation narrative
• the Principles of Test Automation narrative
• the Test Automation Strategy narrative
• the XUnit Basics narrative
• the Transient Fixture Management narrative
• the Persistent Fixture Management narrative
• the Result Verification narrative
• the Using Test Doubles narrative
• the Organizing Our Tests narrative
• the Testing With Databases narrative
• A Roadmap to Effective Test Automation

Reference Material

The chapters within this section are intended to be used a reference material. Each smell, principle, pattern and refactoring is described in more detail complete with code samples (if applicable.) The following links take us to the "home page" for the category of patterns; scroll down to expose the list of patterns in the lower left sidebar and select the appropriate pattern from there. (The main panel lists the top 10 patterns in order of most recent change/checkin.)

• Test Smells
• Test Strategy Patterns
• xUnit Basics Patterns
• Fixture Setup Patterns
• Result Verification Patterns
• Fixture Teardown Patterns
• Test Double Usage Patterns
• Test Organization
• Database Testing Patterns
• Design-for-Testability Patterns
• Attribute Value Patterns

Appendices

• Test Refactorings-A list of the test-specific refactorings and more detailed descriptions of how to do them.
• XUnit Terminology Cross-reference-A cross-reference of the differences in terminology across different members of the xUnit family. E.g. The TestCase class (Java and most others) is called a TestFixture in NUnit.
• XUnit Members-A list of commonly used members of the xUnit family.
• ?Problem-Pattern Cross-Reference?
• ?List of All Pattern Names and Aliases?
• ?List of All Smells and Causes?
• References-A possibly annotated bibliography of material referenced throughout the book.
• Glossary-A one or two sentence definition of each of the terms used in the book.

Other Possible Material

Things I've Chosen to Exclude

I've chosen to exclude the following material from the book because of time or space constraints:

• External Pattern Thumbnails-Thumbnails (short summaries of patterns in existing literature referred to from within this book.
• Testing Techniques-Introduces the basic techniques for identifying things to test such as equivalence classes and boundary values. Lots of good ideas in Pragmatic Unit Testing (Right BICEP, CORRECT).

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