Software Testing Using Test Sheets

Although testing is one of the most important activities in software development, especially in projects which emphasize agile development, the basic approach used to define and report tests has changed little since JUnit was introduced over a decade ago. JUnit and its derivatives such as NUnit significantly simplify the task of programming tests but still leave the test logic tangled up with program scaffolding, making it difficult to see and validate. On the other hand, recently introduced validation oriented approaches, such as FIT, provide a much more concise and easy to understand description of test logic, but cannot cope with code-level testing. In this paper we present a new metaphor for test definition and reporting, referred to as "test sheets", that combines the expressive strength of JUnit with the visual simplicity of tabular approaches such as FIT. After discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the technologies used today we present the test sheet approach using some simple examples.