F# for Testing and Analysis at Code Camp 11 New England

RickM — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:36:00 GMT

At this Saturday’s Code Camp I’ll be giving a brand new presentation on using F#. The goal of this presentation is to have those attending leave with an idea of what F# can help them achieve today as well as instill a desire to know more. This post contains my presentation materials as well as links to additional information on the topics covered.

Presentation Details

F# for Testing and Analytics will be held in the TBC (Technical Briefing Center) at 10:30am.

New England Code Camp 11 Information

Download Presentation Slides: F# for Testing and Analysis.pdf

I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately on the best way to get developers excited about F#. By focusing less on the language’s details and more on what the language can help achieve I hope to impress upon those attending why F# is worth the effort. The preliminary structure of the talk is as follows::

Introduction
- Announcing the New England F# User Group
Why F#?
- Time Savings
- Readability
- Code Exploration
- Robust Software
- Power
F# Testing Toolbox
- xUnit.NET
- TestDriven.NET and NCover
- NaturalSpec
- FsCheck
A Real World Example
- Exploring the Problem Space
- Collect, Analyze, Report
- Visualizing Data

Presentation Influences
John Hughes’s Paper: Why Functional Programming Matters
John Hughes’s Talk: FP – A Secret Weapon for Software Testing
Matthew Podwysocki’s 7 Part Series: Functional Programming Unit Testing

Announcing the New England F# User Group

I’m proud to announce that we will be holding our first New England F# User Group meeting on Monday April 6th, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. It will be held at the aptly named Microsoft NERD center. I hope to see you there.

Visit the F# User Group Homepage for more information.

xUnit.NET

“About a year ago it became clear to myself and Brad Wilson that there were some very clear patterns of success (and failure) with the tools we were using for writing tests. Rather than repeating guidance about "do X" or "don't do Y", it seemed like it was the right time to reconsider the framework itself and see if we could codify some of those rules.”

xUnit.NET Homepage

Learn More about xUnit.NET
Matthew Podwysocki’s The Unit Testing Story in F# Revisited
Jim Burger’s Unit testing in F# with xUnit.NET
Harry Pierson’s Practical F# Parsing: Unit Testing

TestDriven.NET and NCover

“TestDriven.NET is a zero friction unit testing add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The current release of TestDriven.NET supports multiple unit testing frameworks including NUnit, MbUnit and MS Team System and is fully compatible with all versions of the .NET Framework.”

TestDriven.NET Homepage (Includes a free version of NCover)
NCover Homepage

Learn More about TestDriven.NET and NCover
Matthew Podwysocki’s F# + TestDriven.NET + xUnit = Win
Matthew Podwysocki’s FP Unit Testing Part 4 – Code Coverage

NaturalSpec

“The idea of NaturalSpec is to give domain experts the possibility to express their scenarios directly in compilable Unit Test scenarios by using a Domain-specific language (DSL) for Unit Tests. NaturalSpec is completely written in F# – but you don’t have to learn F# to use it. You don’t even have to learn programming at all.”

NaturalSpec Homepage

Learn More about NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s “Getting Started” with NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s Testing QuickSort with NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s Using NaturalSpec to create a spec for C# projects

FsCheck

“FsCheck is a tool for testing .NET programs automatically. The programmer provides a specification of the program, in the form of properties which functions, methods or objects should satisfy, and FsCheck then tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases.”

FsCheck Homepage

Learn More about FsCheck
Claudio Cherubino’s Random testing in F# with FsCheck
Matthew Podwysocki’s FP Unit Testing Part 2 – QuickCheck and FsCheck
Kurt Schelfthout’s FsChecking dnAnalytics Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

FsStory

“FsStory is a library for writing executable user stories in F#. FsStory enables the developer to write user story scenarios (in Given/When/Then form) in F# code.”

FsStory Homepage

Learn More about FsStory
Gustaf Nilsson Kotte’s Fluent language in FsStory
Gustaf Nilsson Kotte’s FsStory, executable stories in F#

Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : fp, conference