FlashBrighton: Unit Testing June 1, 2010

David Holmes scrolled through a window of code. He and his colleague Dr. Seb Watson had been brought in to hunt bugs in an ActionScript project by their client, a wealthy London design house. Noticing something, Holmes bent towards the screen and squinted.

'Do you see this Watson? BakerView.as, line 221, "isHome = true;".'

'Yes Holmes, and I think I’m right in saying that Boolean flag denotes whether BakerView is the root or not,' replied Watson.

Homes looked away from the monitor. 'Other people's observations cloud the mind Watson. If BakerView.isHome is set to false, every other class could change, causing errors all over the app. It should always be true, so we must set up a unit test to monitor it.'

'Unit test?' replied a perplexed Watson.

'Yes Watson. Unit tests are validation checks which ensure that discreet units of code run as expected. In this case the unit test will ensure that inHome equals true. Take a hansom cab to Shoreditch and tell the client we will spend the week writing unit tests. Then meet me at The Werks at 7pm on Tuesday 1st of June, where I will show you what unit tests, integration tests, mocks and TDD are and why we need them. In the meanwhile I shall develop a simple Flash application, and write some tests to verify its behaviour. If all goes well, I'll demonstrate the use of FlexUnit, mocking classes through inheritance and using FlexMonkey to automate the testing of the whole application.'

'Right away Holmes,' puffed Watson, moustache bristling. 'See you on Tuesday!'

As a single strand of human hair fell through a shaft of sunlight and alighted on top of the monitor, Holmes returned to scrutinising the code.

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