Visibly at work
I made a quick video of a day of work at our client’s site.
I have arranged a visit in Valtech by Agitar UK people last week. We had a presentation of AgitarOne (Agitator + Dashboard), their recently-released product. Frankly, the documentation and video presentations on their website do not give it justice: there is much more to it than it seems.
On the surface, it would appear to be limited to an Eclipse plug-in that does monkey testing. Well, that is true, but the extensions around this are what make it really interesting. Agitator would generally discover many assertions in the code by static and dynamic analysis, which allow it to run reasonably powerful unit tests. Assertions can be added by the developer as well.
In case of repetitive situations, factories can be created and in order to get more useful assertions created. These factories can go very far, down to replacing code dynamically, even static methods, which in effect is similar to using Mock objects on code that has not been prepared to do that. Private members of classes are accessible too.
There is no doubt that Agitar is doing something very useful here. And, considering the team seem very good technically, they have the resources to go far. Testing at such a technical level still seems like a hard sell. The question is whether they can sell enough, or at least last long enough until that happens?
Pricing: apparently, it depends on the size of the project. According to an article in InfoWorld, one quote is 25,000 US$ per project, per year for the version from early 2006 for small project.
