Re: comments to JUnit spec

Marian Petras wrote:
> Usability of the most basic features (navigation, presentation of 
> results) is P1.

I agree that nicer display of test output is a high priority. But there 
looks to be a lot of stuff in the current proposal that I would rank as 
lower priority. E.g. all of the test code generation stuff - it's not 
that useful now, and the proposed changes would be a lot of work and 
wouldn't make it much more useful (IMHO). Or

"If multiple corresponding test classes for the current source class in 
multiple test roots exist, a dialog with choice of the test roots is 
displayed..."

Who cares? This situation is quite unlikely, I think; very few users 
would ever see this dialog. And even in the cases where you did have 
multiple test classes for a single source class, just leave the UI as it 
is now (open the first one, the last one, all of them, whatever); the 
user can always go to the Projects tab and open the one they want from 
there.

Similarly, navigating to the test method corresponding to a given source 
method (in the case that there is a 1-1 corresponce, which I would guess 
to be the minority of cases) might be nice, but I wouldn't consider it 
P1 by any means; you can already use Ctrl-Alt-K to go to the test class 
and Ctrl-7 to open the Navigator and pick the method you want. If you 
want to implement such a feature (e.g. if Foo.method is selected, open 
FooTest if it exists but also jump to Foo.testMethod if it exists), 
great, but why add a new keyboard shortcut for it? Just make it the 
default behavior of Ctrl-Alt-K; people will do what they did before and 
be pleasantly surprised that it works a little better.

Take a real project:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/hibernate/Hibernate3/test/org/hibernate/test/

Let's say a developer on it is using NB. What benefits will they see 
from proposed junit module changes? Which changes give the biggest 
benefit compared to amount of work to implement? What do other IDEs do 
for tests that users complain about lack of in NB? (Better display, 
obviously - anything else?)

-J.

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