does anyone have parasoft .test or jtest experience

Question

First i have no experience on parasoft .test or jtest experience. I have read the datasheet that the product could automatically generate unit test.

but I am woundering how useful the auto generated unit test are. Does it really do not need any other effort by developer?

any experience sharing are welcome.

thanks a lot!

Answer 1

We used JTest for our product recently. We didn't use the standard product, we used the Eclipse Plugin. The standard product is built on the OSGI framework (read: it's like Eclipse), but you have to import and create your projects. We were already using Eclipse, so it made sense for us to simply use the plugin, which has all of the same capabilities.

While there are many things that JTest can do for you, there are also many irritating things about it. For example, Jtest's static analysis tool is what is really worthwhile, IMHO. It can look for lots of errors and has a pretty good reporting system. But, while unit test generation is okay, but I think I spent as much or more time fixing and enhancing the generated tests than I would have just making them myself. Administering Jtest is also somewhat complicated and involved.

The built-in mechanisms to make unit tests, stub objects, parameterized unit tests, etc. are not well documented. At least, my little brain couldn't make good use of them in the two years we used the product. However, a lot of their super awesome features (like GUI tracing, command-line interface, the Bug Detective, reporting system etc.) all require extra, very expensive licenses.

Really, Jtest just gives you an easy way to manage the execution of static and unit testing. But it's really expensive. I can't believe they charge thousands of dollars per license of that stuff. You'll also find that they will want to train you, which you almost need because the documentation is pretty bad. Which is odd, because the user's guide is like 900 pages long.

But here's a big hint: you can do it for free. If I had to do it over, I would have pushed hard for using these products (which, oddly enough, look and feel very similar to Jtest) http://code.google.com/javadevtools/codepro/doc/index.html

I wouldn't get Jtest thinking that this will be a small something to add to your developer's routine. Jtest can become a huge time and process sink.