Java Spec

Discontinued.

"On November 2, 1999, Sun[tm] made a strategic decision to discontinue further development efforts on its suite of Testing Tool products, which includes the JavaLoad?[tm], JavaStar[tm], JavaScope?[tm] and JavaSpec[tm] products. No new development has been done on these products in the way of feature additions or compatibility updates for new releases of the supported platforms (OS or JDK)." -- http://access1.sun.com/suntest/index.html

As of February 4, 2000, Sun will no longer be accepting orders for the family of Testing Tool products (http://www.sun.com/workshop/testingtools/index.html).

JavaSpec is a software testing tool that tests Java applications and applets through their APIs. JavaSpec is a unit tester, designed to capture a test specification to test the API of a single Java class. JavaSpec runs test cases in the specification created by the user against a method, indicating whether the assertions were true (passed) or false (failed). The Test Results Report presents a summary of the overall test results, displayed as a grid. Developers and QA engineers can see how each test result is clearly linked to the test data, conditions, and assertions created in the Test Editor to easily understand and analyze the results.

I evaluated JavaSpec for developer-based class testing. It gives you more up front, automatically creating boundary test cases for each method and allows you to add and remove test cases visually. It is better at creating and presenting detailed reports of test execution. It allows you to set up each test with a Before and After section that wraps around the test. This is where it fell short, because at this point you are adding code inside a JavaSpec class method. When I got into a real-life test example where a lot of support code was needed, it fell short of my needs because I could not create helper methods to do this. In light of this and the price, I recommended JavaUnit. -- Mark Mosher, mailto:mosher@acm.org