Take control of your time

Testing is all about verifying that something works as expected. What are the challenges then? There are many, one very obvious is to actually know how it should work. Another challenge is to isolate the system under test so that it is possible to know what is tested and determine if that specific part works as expected.

Test drive an implementation using an Executable Specification – revisited

An example is perhaps the best way to describe something. Concrete examples are easier to understand than abstract descriptions.

I will show how Cucumber-JVM can be used to specify an example and how the example can be connected to the system under test, SUT. The example can then be executed using any IDE or using Maven.

Separating tests in Maven

The way Maven file structure is defined is a great way to separate unit tests and production code. Unit tests are fast. So fast that developers developing using Test Driven Development, TDD, doesn’t have any performance problems when applying the Red-Green-Refactor cycle in their work. A large unit test suit is expected to be executed in seconds.

There is, however, no standard on how the files should be structured for slower tests (integration/acceptance/system et.al.). A common property for these tests is that they are slow. They often require a complete system setup in a known state. They use the filesystem, network, database and similar slow resources. Slow tests are normally not executed often. Developers seldom have the patience to wait for a build a long time before writing the next thing. Using them in a Red-Green-Refactor cycle is not practical. It takes too long time.

So what options do we have to separate the fast units tests and the slow tests? There are two main tracks that I have explored.

• Separating tests with name or package conventions
• Separating slow tests in a test module

What is a good test?

A colleague asked that question the other day. What is a good test? It is a really difficult question to answer. There are a number of properties that hold true for a good test. I will list some of them and discuss why I think they are important. Others may think that the order of importance is different or that other properties are more important then those that I list.

I will show some examples using Java and JUnit of what I think are bad tests and how they can be refactored to something better.

Tests are automated in my world. I always try to avoid manually testing. The main reason for this is that manual testing is slow and hard to repeat arbitrary many times. Therefore, test should be read as automated test in for the rest of this text.

Test drive an implementation using an Executable Specification

An example is perhaps the best way to describe something. Concrete examples are easier to understand then abstract descriptions.

I will show how Cucumber-JVM can be used to specify an example and how the example can be connected to the system under test, SUT. The example can then be executed using any IDE or using Maven.

Test drive the implementation of a database layer

Development guided by test is perhaps the best way to make sure that your solution works and is possible to verify. I will show how you can develop a database layer guided by tests. It will be divided into two parts. The first part will be an in memory solution and the second part will be implemented using Java Persistence API, JPA, and Hypersonic. The second implementation is supposed to replace the first one guided by the tests developed for the in memory solution.

A Generics example

Generics has been a a part of Java since Java 5. It will allow you to write code that handles types without deciding which type upfront. This is of course very useful for collections. It used to be done using the inheritance system and casting Object to the type you knew should be used.

FEST Assert – a fluent interface for assertions

Hamcrest is a great framework for assertThat and it is bundled with JUnit. It is getting some competition from another framework, the FEST assertThat framework. The idea behind FEST is to use a fluent interface. This means that you can use your development environments code completion features to build your asserts. Its main goal is to improve test code readability and make maintenance of tests easier.

Why should you use different technical practises when you develop software?

Why not hack away as usual and hope for the best?

Automatically integration test an ejb with Maven

We want to perform an integration test of a system using Maven. The application must be deployed on an application
server and the application server must be started before we can perform the integration tests. The application
should be undeployed and the application server should be terminated after the integration test has been performed
no matter what the result of the test was.

How can this be achieved with Maven?