Code Tester…

According to Steven Feuerstein’s post on his ToadWorld Blog, CodeTester 1.5 will be available soon. It will not yet fullfill all your testing needs, but it’s a great start.

I am one of the moderators of the  utPLSQL project (and the creator of the forum used by the community) (also mentioned in the post), but I think CodeTester is a big step forward. We will need to see what the free version of CodeTester will be capable of, but my thoughts (at this moment) are that people will start using CodeTester instead of utPLSQL. Maybe we need to keep utPLSQL as-is (which is mostly what is happening at this moment), keep it available for the current users and direct new users to CodeTester to check that out as well and don’t worry about them using CodeTester instead of utPLSQL.

I must say that I started using this tool instead of utPLSQL myself, because it is, like Steven wrote, more intuitive to just declare the testcases and have the tool generate the necessary code. The generated test code will mostly be compatible with utPLSQL, but if you have testcases that test stuff not (yet) available in utPLSQL, then it won’t work of course.

I have been working on a ‘view parsing utility’ for CodeGen (previously Qnxo and soon to be released as freeware on ToadWorld) and I have used CodeTester to test my implementation of a specific function. I came up with at least one testcase that didn’t work correctly, because my code couldn’t handle that case yet. I decided to make a completely new implementation for the function and using CodeTester I could verify that my new implementation would not break any of my existing testcases and therefore that my new code would still work for any ‘old’ usage.

This should have been possible using utPLSQL as well, but it appears easier to me to use a graphical front-end instead of having to write and edit the testcode. At least it took less time since I didn’t have to write all the test code myself.

2 thoughts on “Code Tester…

  1. >> The generated test code will mostly be compatible with utPLSQL

    Does this mean we can export scripts from CodeTester and run them via utPLSQL? If this is the case then I will definitely take a look at CodeTester again. I agree that having a GUI is nice but what I like about utPLSQL is that being pure command line driven PL/SQL I can use it on any Oracle database. For instance, CodeTester (and TOAD come to that) is useeless for databases on isolated Solaris boxes where sql*plus is the only tool.

    Cheers, APC


  2. APC –

    Quest Code Tester, like utPLSQL, relies on a PL/SQL backend to execute tests. So just as with utPLSQL, you can run the Code Tester-generated package in any instance in which Code Tester is installed and accessible.

    Also, please understand that the value of the Code Tester is *not* simply that you have GUI from which to run tests, but that it actually generates all or most of the test code. With utPLSQL you must write hundreds, thousands of lines of code. Not the case with Code Tester.

    I hope you give it a try!

    Steven Feuerstein
    PL/SQL Evangelist and Quest Code Tester creator
    Quest Software


Leave a Reply to Steven Feuerstein Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *