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On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Fraser Goffin <goffinf@g...> wrote: >> But XMLUnit doesn't let you do that because it requires an absolute path > > What makes you think that ? What if your XPath starts with > //MynodeUnderTest. Is that still a problem ? > Permit me to summarise and withdraw from being drawn in to a perpetual response cycle. The idea of not exposing navigation paths in test code to the QA community is not new. They write books about it, give names to techniques to avoid doing it and stage training courses and write conference papers about it. Of course they also make money from it. This was common knowledge long before unit testing frameworks and automated unit testing became de rigeur in the development community. I personally discovered it on a job 21 years ago. As part of my degree I read alot of research about evolutionary computational methods for automated test case generation. I was shocked to find that the research community was using 100% code coverage as a benchmark for evaluating the efficacy of their algorithms. Shocked because I knew that that was a very weak criteria. That is if your algorithm could automatically generate test cases that gave 100% code coverage it really hadn't achieved much (to a large extent the same thing is a by product of test driven development) so such research was never going to have much industrial relevance. That much was obvious to me because I had a background as a QA dev going into university. As a QA dev that came from the development community I noticed things that seemed weird by virtue of my prior experience. Why are you paying 5k for a box of tricks that has fewer capabilities than Visual Studio which is a 10th of the price. If you want to run a test against the underlying database why don't you just write SQL? So when you have oscillated between the various communities (academic, dev and testing) you notice situations that have arisen from a lack of cross fertilisation of ideas between the respective communities and you notice that instinctively. I would emphasise that it applies equally to all three strands I have been involved in. They all reinvent wheels and don't take advantage of what is common knowledge beyond the confines of the community that they inhabit. So I've tried to share an instance of this in this thread. I used to have similar arguments with QA people - why do you tolerate products like WinRunner and QARun that come with proprietary scripting languages why don't you demand products that hook into mainstream programming languages - and they used to come up with a whole set of justifications for justifying the status quo - not dissimilar to the genus of some of the arguments I've seen here. So I'll just sign off with this. That it is always worth looking outside to see how other communities have dealt with problems similar to the one you are contemplating. Hopefully we can all agree on that. Ciao.
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