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Reading Time: 5 minutesIn this release, our coding paratroopers focused their efforts on Jtest’s Unit Test Assistant in the context of the following areas:
On the static analysis side of things, we’ve added support for new security guidelines, along with standard bug fixes and improvements. Read on to learn more about these enhancements and how this release helps teams increase and achieve code coverage metrics and easily maintain it.
IntelliJ has gained more share in the IDE market, and we noticed! With Jtest 10.4, IntelliJ users can now rejoice and leverage the Unit Test Assistant as part of their unit testing process. The same great unit testing features that have always been in Eclipse can now be used in IntelliJ. Don’t worry, Eclipse users, we aren’t leaving you guys behind — we will be moving forward adding all the same features to both IDEs. IntelliJ was just playing catch up.
As more and more teams embrace unit testing as an initiative to help bring better quality to software, increasing and achieving code coverage metrics starts to become a challenge. Trying to identify holes in code coverage and then having to either create a new test from scratch or figure out if you can re-use an existing test can be a very time-consuming process.
Rather than go through this painful process, the Jtest Unit Test Assistant can help eliminate many of those tasks for you and keep you focused on the actual business logic that needs to be tested. With the 10.4 release of Jtest, the Unit Test Assistant’s recommendations have been enhanced to now include coverage recommendations, which helps identify gaps in coverage and helps fill in those areas.
It does this by finding areas of untested code based on the last unit test run, and can help you clone the existing test that gets closest to the area in question, to help you cover the code in question. If multiple existing tests were executed, the assistant will recommended the test that will get you closet to covering the uncovered code.
As many organizations switch to becoming more Agile, time becomes an important factor. Developers are churning more code than ever before and the business is releasing more frequently. With this comes the important challenge of quality and how to maintain a high level of quality as your time window shrinks.
Developers want to ensure that they are delivering high-quality code, and therefore should execute their entire test suite to ensure there are no regressions. With a small suite of tests, this might not take too much time, but as the test suite grows, the time it takes to run can grow immensely.
Developers are an expensive resource, and if they are waiting for their entire suite of unit tests to fully run before they can check their code into source control, that wastes a lot of money as they sit idle (and further reduces the team’s productivity). Or even worse, they check in their code straight into source control without running any tests, because it takes too long…. and we all know that isn’t a good practice.
In Jtest 10.4, you can re-claim this lost time and productivity with Parasoft’s proprietary Change-Based Testing technology in the IDE, which identifies and executes only the unit tests that were affected by local source code changes.
Parasoft Jtest can determine which tests are affected by the local changes and propose them to the user so that they can choose which ones to execute. This allows developers to optimize their development workflows and receive immediate feedback based on their changes, letting them focus their attention on the change in question.
Modifying local test configurations in Jtest 10.x has been a pain, and our older users from our 9.x days miss the power of the old test configuration editor. Well, you are in luck, we listened and brought in a new test configuration editor for the IDE, allowing users to easily create and modify test configurations with a browser-based UI (also consistent with Parasoft DTP). Users no longer need to modify the configurations manually via a text file or have to log in to DTP to make changes.
The test configurations for outdated standards have been removed and we’ve added the following new built-in test configurations:
Security remains a big concern for most organizations, and with Jtest 10.4, we continue to increase our static analysis rules to improve software code security. In this area, we added several new code analysis rules and updated existing ones. See our release notes for more details on the specific rule updates.
For those users leveraging our reporting and analytics software DTP with Jtest, in this release, Parasoft DTP 5.4.0 is required to leverage DTP capabilities and workflows with Jtest 10.4.
For those wanting to try out Jtest 10.4 and its Unit Test Assistant, we are rolling out a 7-day trial immediately available for download, which means you can get access to the product (the Unit Test Assistant only, on a limited basis) for 7 days. You can go through the product yourself and see first-hand all the goodies the Jtest Unit Test Assistant has to offer.
Finally, in Jtest 10.4, we updated our IDE support:
More details regarding all these enhancements can be found in the release notes. If you are an existing customer, you can check out the Parasoft Customer Portal to get access to them and download the latest installers for the latest features. If you’re new to Parasoft, you can get started with that trial!
Happy Java testing!
Kapil is a Product Manager at Parasoft, focusing on Parasoft Jtest. Kapil held several technical positions ranging from software engineer to development lead, before moving into product management.