Article:		Teaching Java the Extreme Way
Subject:		Wwhy wouldn't you use JUnit?
Date:		2002-10-24 08:16:01
From:		iansloman
Daniel, why wouldn't you use JUnit for unit testing, especially since it already exists and would save having to write your own testing code?

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• Why wouldn't you use JUnit?
  2002-11-21 11:58:47  Daniel H. Steinberg | [View]
  
  

  Ian,

  
  
  

  That's a great question. I wanted to separate the idea of testing first from JUnit -- which I use every day and appreciate how it has improved the quality of my code. There are some people who feel that introducing the JUnit structure is a difficult way to begin a course. They feel that there's too much stuff that would need to be taught before the students are ready to begin.

  
  
  

  For the most part, I agree with you. I think you can start right off with JUnit. Here's why I didn't.

  
  

  In the first article I made a big fuss about what I didn't like about beginning with HelloWorld as a first program. I didn't want to turn around and say, "remember when I said not to teach them main(), and public, and static, and void, and arrays, and so on -- now teach your students TestCase and so on first."

  My hope was that this lesson taught students to create a simple class that contained a single method that was able to respond to a method call. The code that the student sees is very clean and the prompts they receive should be instructive and helpful.

  
  
  

  Thoughts?

  
  

  Thanks, Daniel