Tag: Testing

In the past I’ve talked a little about some of my experiences with software testing. However, my experience with any formal approaches to testing have been fairly limited. In this post I will describe my first experience with test-driven development.

In a previous post I touched upon the idea of testing software, in the context of FizzBuzz. Today, I will discuss testing once again. This time, instead of testing a simple program like FizzBuzz, I will be testing a more complex system. Specifically, I will be testing a Robocode robot.

Fizz buzz (also written as FizzBuzz) was originally a word and number game used to teach children about division. In this game children sit in a circle and take turns counting from 1. However, if a number is divisible by 3, they say “Fizz,” if it is divisible by 5, they say “Buzz,” and if it divisible by both, they say “FizzBuzz.” More recently, it has found its way into the world of programming thanks to these blogs here and here. These blogs claim that many entry-level programmers, including those with a degree in computer science, cannot write a simple program that outputs the results of FizzBuzz. My task was to time myself while writing a program in Java, using Eclipse, that would output the results of FizzBuzz for the numbers 1 to 100. Beyond this, the implementation details were left up to me. However, I was also required to implement a test of the program to verify that the output was correct.