Increasingly I’ve heard questions asked as to whether Adobe Consulting are still supporting FlexUnit, which made a journey from iteration::two to ultimately rest, almost hidden away, as part of the ActionScript 3 APIs on Adobe Labs.
The fact of the matter is, not only is Adobe Consulting leveraging FlexUnit each and every day on our projects, but we continue to be advocates to our customers of using FlexUnit on their projects. But more importantly, I wanted to just put out a short blog post to update you with a few things around unit-testing and test-driven development with Flex.
A new user-experience for Flex Unit
First and foremost, we’re eating our own dogfood/sipping our own champagne, and our user-experience practice within Adobe Consulting is working with our technology practice to get some better insight into HOW we unit-test our projects, how we leverage the tool, in order that we can release an update to Flex Unit with an improved Flex-based user-experience.
A Code Coverage tool for Flex Unit
I don’t want to post too much here, for fear of stealing Alex Uhlmann’s well deserved thunder; Alex has been working for some time now with the counsel of our consulting practice, and with our engineering team, to ensure that projects built with Flex 3 can be instrumented by a test coverage tool he is developing. If you were at Sascha Wolter’s Flash conference in Germany some weeks back, you will have seen Alex sneak this tool and talk about test-coverage in detail there.
If, as a Java Developer who works with JUnit, you are familiar with Clover, then you will have a good idea of what we plan on releasing for FlexUnit. The test coverage tool will give you a clearer understanding of where your unit-tests written with FlexUnit are successfully exercising your codebase, and where you need to focus some unit-testing attention in order to ensure that code cannot “break undetected” by your test-suite.
Our user-experience team is also focussed on understanding the task flows and usage patterns of the code-coverage tool in some of our current projects, in order that we can also release this tool with a useful, usable and desirable user-experience.
I’ll ask Alex to blog much more about this tool in the weeks ahead.
Ambitiously, we hope to have both tools available to you for download as early as possible in the new year; however, if you are using FlexUnit then a new user-experience and a companion test-coverage tool is on it’s way…
XD Matters 