O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over 5 Tips for Unit Testing. Unit Testing and Test Driven Development are a hot topics in the Flash community lately, especially on Twitter. A few weeks ago, after realizing how complex my F*CSS library was getting, I decided to go back and write FlexUnit test for the library in a hope to use TDD moving forward.

AsUnit is an open source framework for unit testing in Flash. AsUnit provides a low level automated testing system that is your first line of defense for catching bugs in your application. The concept of unit testing has been around for a long time as part of the traditional Waterfall model of software development. However, it has gained in popularity recently as one of the main tenets of Extreme Programming. One of the tenants of Extreme Programming is that you write unit tests first and then your code. You also refactor code often as you add features. Unit tests help find errors quickly as code is refactored and can be used as part of regression testing to make sure the new code has not affected existing functionality.

The concept of unit testing has been around for a long time as part of the traditional Waterfall model of software development. However, it has gained in popular recently as one of the main tenets of Extreme Programming. In Extreme Programming you write unit tests first and then your code. You also refactor code often as you add features. Unit tests help find errors quickly as code is refactored and can be used as part of regression testing to make sure new code has not affected existing functionality.