An Introduction to Test-Driven Code Generation - LIFL

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EuroPython 2006 Refereed Paper Track AnyUser list_projects submit_project AnyUser Student select_project Teacher affect_project Student Supervisor Supervisor Teacher Figure 1: Use Cases for the Management of Technical Projects 3-tiers web application using CherryPy. The overall structure of the application follows the Model / View / Controller design pattern: The presentation layer (view) is coded using CherryPy, the processing layer (controller) is composed of pure Python classes, and the data layer (model) is made of simple objects in this paper (but it could be defined as a relational / object mapping like SQLObject [17]). Starting from the use cases presented in figure 1, an actor is translated as a controller which is implemented as a class. Each action that can be performed by this actor is translated as an operation of the controller class. The actions are processing data items that can be displayed or retrieved from the presentation layer. Figure 2 presents a simplified version of the application architecture. It underlines two aspects of the application: A use case is orthogonal to the three tiers of the application, and the application can be seen as a stack of use case implementations. list_projects submit_project select_project View Controller Model Figure 2: Architecture of the Technical Project Management System (excerpt) 6
EuroPython 2006 Refereed Paper Track 3.1 Overview For this first step, we choose to implement the list_projects use case. This use case is available to any user during the whole life-cycle of the application. Before going to the code, let’s have a look at a more detailed presentation of the use case (sometime called textual scenario). The scenario here is really simple: 1. A user requests the list of projects. 2. The system provides the list of projects. So first we have to define the concept of project (model), then develop the operation inside the controller class, and finally develop the presentation class (view) that provides access to this controller. 3.2 Model At this point, the model is limited to the concept of project. In order to stay simple, and as we only use part of the real application as an illustration for this paper, we are going to consider a project to be defined as a name (and that’s all). We do not enter the details of the persistence solutions that could be used, and we stick to the use of simple Python objects. 3.2.1 Tests We consider a Project as a simple object with a single attribute containing its name. The test is quite trivial: We instantiate a Project and we compare the value of its attribute to the value we have provided to its constructor. The complete test is given in figure 3. After making this test fail, (first because neither the abstraction module nor the Project class have been defined yet, and second because the attribute would not have been set in the constructor –in order to watch the test failing) we are going to make it pass. import unittest import abstraction class TestProject(unittest.TestCase): def test_project(self): p = abstraction.Project(’Project1’) self.assertEqual(p.name, ’Project1’) if __name__ == ’__main__’: unittest.main() Figure 3: Test case of the Project class (Model) 3.2.2 Implementation Based upon the test defined in figure 3, which defines the goal of the current implementation step, we write the Project class presented in figure 4: a simple class, containing the read-only property name that is initialized at object creation (it is difficult to make it simpler 6 ). 6 You could argue that the use of a property is not simpler than using an attribute. That is correct, however the property is defined as read-only which is interesting. 7
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