Release Notes

JT Harness Binary Distribution
Version 4.3

December 2010

Table of Contents

Introduction
Layout
Tutorial
Requirements
Run JT Harness
About This Release
Usage Notes

Introduction

The JT harness is based on Oracle's JavaTest harness. The JT harness is a general purpose, fully-featured, flexible, and configurable test harness very well suited for most types of unit testing. Originally developed as a test harness to run TCK test suites, it has since evolved into a general purpose test platform.

The JT harness:

JT harness 4.3 contains new features as well as bug fixes. We encourage you to try JT harness, participate in the community, and contribute to further development.

This binary release contains a built version of the JT harness (lib/javatest.jar) and a tutorial that introduces you to the JT harness graphical user interface.


Layout

The JT harness binary distribution is laid out as follows:

install_dir/

legal/
Contains the licenses and Oracle copyrights that apply to this open source product.
lib/
Contains the JT harness binary javatest.jar, the JUnit binary jt-junit.jar, and support libraries.
doc/
Contains documentation that accompanies the JT harness product.
examples/tutorial
Contains the JT harness tutorial (tutorial.html)

Tutorial

The JT harness tutorial includes an HTML tutorial that uses an example API and testsuite to introduce you to the JT harness graphical user interface. Follow these steps to run the tutorial:

  1. Make examples/tutorial your current directory.
  2. Open tutorial.html in your web browser and follow the step-by-step directions.

Requirements

The JT harness requires the technologies listed in the following table.

Technology Where to Get It Notes
JDK™ version 1.5 or later http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/overview/index.html

Run JT Harness

Run the JT harness using the following command:

% java -jar javatest.jar

Note: Typically, a user executes JT harness in the context of a test suite. Read the tutorial documentation for instructions about how to execute JT harness with the tutorial example test suite.


About This Release

Version 4.3 contains bug fixes and the following new features and notable behavior changes:

Bugs Fixed in Release 4.3

This release of the harness contains fixes for the following defects:

Report Converter does not highlight bad user input with a background color.
After checking passed tests and closing the configuration editor, the Not Run tab should be disabled.
Selecting Help in the Template Editor incorrectly opens the Configuration Editor help
The Load Configuration dialog should not be closed after discarding error messages
Tree selection needs right-click multi-select capability
Create Report/Report Converter tools - the Report Directory input field is not convenient to use
Hanging causes the loss of test results in the cache
Some configuration answers have duplicate responses in the HTML report
Sometimes an IllegalStateException is thrown in EventDispatchThread when trying to create a work directory
The Javatest harness should produce a warning message if a new configuration is opened before the old one is saved
Exceptions thrown when a configuration file has been moved or deleted, are not useful
A mangled error message is displayed when the Test Manager starts
Usability: Configuring an interview for a freshly opened test suite is difficult
Launching the Configuration Editor from the Create Work directory dialog does not work properly
Save Template dialog incorrectly shows the .jti extension

 

Bugs Fixed in Release 4.3 Specifically of Interest to Test Suite Architects

The following bugs will be of interest to test suite architects.

External web pages can be opened through the Configuration Editor More info system
The InterviewParameters.checkForUpdates() method is not called for a template object when loading WD
javatest.jar is compiled without debug information
The Interview.getRoot() method is now public
Added the ability to retrieve the internal representation of an interview path to a Question using the Interview.getRawPath() method
Fixed performance problems in template propagation
Added the following new ProductInfo class methods: getVersionMajor() and getVersionMinor()
Reimplemented the Question.hashCode() method
Setting float resolution on PropertiesQuestion works correctly
The setValue() method correctly reevaluates the interview path from within interview questions

Known Bugs in Release 4.3

The following bugs were discovered too late to be fixed in this release.

Tree selection may change during execution
Right-clicking in test lists does not work on MacOS
Test output can grow until it uses up available memory. The output should be truncated if it is too long.
In the Log Viewer it is not possible to mark log text when live scrolling mode is ON
Huges status reason strings can corrupt the harness
After the release shipped, a problem was reported that causes a deadlock situation in the JT harness GUI. The problem occurs only under a particular set of circumstances in very large test suites (10,000 or more tests).

The primary symptom of the problem presents itself when the main GUI display is shown with test counters (folder summary display). When the test suite is running, the counters begin to count and then stop. At this point, the menus are not responsive and the screen does not redraw itself when needed. This state can be confirmed by looking at the JVM threads and determining if a deadlock exists involving the event dispatch thread and one of the other harness job threads.

You can work around this problem by using the Configuration Editor to answer No to the question that asks if you wish to run tests based on their prior execution status.

Tree refresh works incorrectly when triggered programmatically from the ContextManager
In some dialogs Print functionality might be available, but using it results in a NullPointerException

Usage Notes

Run JT Harness with Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 5.0 or later. Note that the search capability in the online help does not work correctly in Java SE 5.0_03 through Java SE 5.0_06.

Printing Pages from the Online Help and Test Reports

Because of the method the Java SE platform uses to render fonts, when you print a document from the harness user interface, the fonts in the printed documents are larger than they are when rendered on the screen.

The JT Harness User's Guide has been provided in PDF form for your use in printing pages from the documents. While the online help viewer supports printing operations, in some cases you may be unable to use it to print a specific page. If this occurs, use the PDF version of the appropriate User's Guide to print the page. Printing of non-HTML report types is not supported. Users are informed of this when they attempt to print a non-HTML report type. Support will be added for this in a future release.

Changing Status Colors in the GUI

JT Harness allows you to specify the status colors used in the GUI. See the online help for detailed information about changing the default status colors.

Agent Monitor Tool

The Agent Monitor tool may not apply to all test suites, even if the test suite uses an agent. See your test suite documentation for detailed information about the agent that it uses and its use of the Agent Monitor tool.