The Austin Java Users Group had a presentation by Borland last night talking about XP. The speaker constantly made the very valid point "if you've not got complete unit tests you're not doing extreme programming". My thought is that the support provided by Java for this sort of thing is really rather poor.

I realise this isn't going to change but a language designed for the sort of corporate programming that Java is used for should probably have some sort of built in support for testing. On the other hand, how do you make it possible for people to get started programming quickly with a language, which seems to be necessary if you want to get adoption, if they need to build a whole superstructure for test support.

The approach taken by Java is projects like JUnit which provide test structure combined with automatic generation of test skeletons from the code to be tested which is done by tools like JBuilder. I just have the feeling that there should be a more seamless way to produce integration the description of the tests to be performed into the actual code to be tested.

An interesting suggestion I heard today is to invert the process and to generate a skeleton of the class from the unit test. As the tests ought to test all public, protected and default accessibility methods it should be possible to automatically work out from the unit tests what these methods are and what the arguments to them should be.