Hand-rolled mocks made easy
Unit testing is something we all need to do, but getting good code
coverage can be a daunting task. In this article, Gary Tong focuses
on one of the basic elements of unit tests: mock objects. Using a
hybrid static/dynamic approach, he shows how flexible, useful mock
objects can be written in a matter of minutes.
Gary Tong,
July 2006
Fit for analysts and developers
Do you think automated user acceptance testing is a cool idea, but
impossible or not worth doing? Have you been bogged down by the
traditional record/script/replay approaches and unable to automate
until the code is complete? This article will show you how the
Framework for Integrated Test (Fit) makes it easy to overcome these
challenges and practice test-first design from the user
perspective.
Narayanan Jayaratchagan,
June 2006
Test-first development with FitNesse
This article describes how the open source wiki FitNesse can be
used to implement a real test-first development process by bringing
customer, requirements engineer, developer, and tester together.
Requirements get more precise, change is minimal, and test data is
removed from the JUnit tests, making them much cleaner and easier
to maintain.
Stephan Wiesner,
February 2006
Add Zing to your unit tests
Unit testing has become an inseparable part of the software
development lifecycle. Many open source tools and frameworks assist
developers in writing unit tests. However, little has been done to
help developers write generic test cases, reduce coding effort, and
generate maintainable unit test cases. Generally, developers write
numerous test methods to test different data scenarios for a given
method. They also must handle database states before every unit
test case runs to ensure consistency in test results. Creating a
test framework that facilitates the writing of generic and
configurable unit test cases and also integrates with multiple open
source testing tools and frameworks can solve these issues. This
article discusses how to create such a test framework.
Tanmay Ambre and Abhijeet Kesarkar,
December 2005
Don't sweat unit tests
By hiding the services your code depends on behind interfaces and
using jMock to mock out those interfaces, you can unit test
anything. In this article, Graham King shows how to build a simple
example application by testing first. He starts with simple,
easy-to-test methods, then progresses to ones that require external
infrastructure support. He shows how working with interfaces and
using mock objects makes testing easy.
Graham King,
November 2005
Exception management and error tracking in J2EE
Think back on your last J2EE project. Did you encounter situations
when errors were never logged—or logged more than once? Did
you spend countless hours tracking down a bug, whose real cause was
that someone swallowed an exception somewhere? Did your users see a
stack trace? If so, chances are, you might need a common strategy
for exception management and some complementing code. This article
provides the basis for developing a set of policies along with a
supporting framework for error handling in the J2EE world.
Kåre Kjelstrøm and Jens Schjærff Byager,
July 2005
JMeter tips
Developing a load-testing script using JMeter is not difficult, as
JMeter provides a rich set of elements and a drag-and-drop-style
GUI. However, creating a test script that closely models the real
loads is often considered difficult. One of the reasons is that
some of the parameters critical to test quality are confusing. This
article solves some of the puzzles for you, and, as a related
topic, presents guidelines for response-time requirements.
Chi-chang Kung,
July 2005
Build, deploy, and test EJB components in just a few seconds
Wouldn't life be easier if you could build, deploy, and test
Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) components in just a few seconds? This
article shows you how to simplify the EJB development cycle. Author
Nader Aeinechi shows how to easily create input data for your JUnit
tests with XStream. He explains the benefits of running your tests
with an embedded EJB container called OpenEJB and how those same
tests can be run unmodified on your full-featured production EJB
container.
Nader Aeinehchi,
June 2005
TestNG: The next generation of unit testing
Everyone knows JUnit, the Java unit-testing framework. JUnit has
some annoying specificities that make it unsuitable for complex
unit testing involving grouping, asynchronous, and parallel
testing. This article introduces TestNG, an alternative testing
framework targeted at J2SE 5.0.
Thierry Janaudy,
April 2005
Patch an exception-handling framework
This article describes the Patch framework, an exception-handling
framework for Java programs. It forces exception handling to remain
outside a system's main business logic. In addition, that business
logic is not affected when the way an exception is handled changes.
Niranjan R. Kamath,
March 2005
Should we be doing more automated testing?
To help developers decide whether they should be doing more
automated testing, Ben Teese presents two questions in this
article: Are developers being realistic about the testing they will
complete on their applications? And when does automatic testing
make sense for their applications?
Ben Teese,
March 2005
LISA smiles on J2EE app testers
LISA (Load-bearing Internet-based Simulator Application) from iTKO
is a tough slope to ascend; the tool is nothing less than a
development environment for building tests, and it takes a bit of
time to get used to LISA's way of doing things. The view from the
top, though, is worth the effort—LISA provides remarkable
breadth in J2EE regression testing.
Rick Grehan,
January 2005
Getting started with test-driven development
In this article, an excerpt from Test-Driven Development: A
J2EE Example (Apress, 2004), author Thomas Hammell helps you
select the right tools for getting started with test-driven
development (TDD).
Thomas Hammell, With Russell Gold and Tom Snyder,
December 2004
A lightweight nonintrusive EJB testing framework
This article presents a simple, easy-to-deploy framework that
enables fine-grained tests to be run on the container, making it
possible to develop and maintain Enterprise JavaBeans components
using a test-driven development (TDD) process.
Phil Zoio,
November 2004
Automate GUI tests for Swing applications
Automation is necessary for frequent and consistent testing, which
is the foundation of agile development. However, acceptance tests
of GUI applications are not always easy to automate. This article
explains a simple way of automating Java Swing application
acceptance tests, starting from Swing components' unit tests and
extending them to acceptance tests without human intervention.
Ichiro Suzuki,
November 2004
Recent top five:
Let's talk about exceptions ...
How do you handle exceptions? Do you think upfront about the type of exceptions that you want to catch or do you just let
the outside world handle it?
-- Jeroen van Bergen in JW Blogs
