I am working on JPA project and I want to have unit tests (although as a database is required, in this case it will be more as integration tests.)
What is the best way to test JPA project? jUnit can do that ? Is there other better way ?
Thank you very much
You have given limited information on the tools/frameworks you are using and a very general question, but I will give a quick answer on the points you raise. These are just pointers however as I believe you need to do a good bit more leg-work in order for you to figure out what is best for your particular project.
Junit allows you to target your class methods with specific parameters and to examine the return values. The returned values maybe an entity that should have certain field at certain values, a list of entities with certain expected field values, exceptions etc., etc. (Whatever you methods are). You can run your test as you introduce new functionality, and re-run them to test for regression as development proceeds. You can easily test edge cases and non-nominal stuff. Getting Junit up and running in Java SE/EE is quite straight forward so that could be a good option for you to get stick-in with testing. It is one of the quicker ways I use to test new functionality.
Spring/MVC – Using an MVC framework can certainly be useful. I have used JSF/Primefaces. But that is principally because the application was to be a JSF application and such development tests gave confidence that the ‘Model’ layer provided what was needed to the rest of the framework. So this provides some confidence in the model/JPA/DB layers (it is certainly nice to see the data that is delivered) but does not provide for flexible, nimble and targeted testing you might expect from Junit.
I think Dbunit might be something to look at when you’ve made some progress with JUnit.
See http://dbunit.sourceforge.net/
DbUnit is a JUnit extension (also usable with Ant) targeted at
database-driven projects that, among other things, puts your database
into a known state between test runs. This is an excellent way to
avoid the myriad of problems that can occur when one test case
corrupts the database and causes subsequent tests to fail or
exacerbate the damage.
Related
I have recently come across the Citrus framework and was trying to use it.
But I found I can use Mockito as well in mocking the external service to do some Integration testing of my code.
What are specific advantages of using Citrus over Mockito?
I have recently come across the Lasagne and was trying to eat it. But I found I can use Pizza as well in eating at the dinner to do some food filling of my stomach.
What are the specific advantages of eating Lasagne over Pizza?
Do you get my point here? Your question is way too generic to get a good answer as you always need to decide based on the use case and what you want to do. Besides that Mockito and Citrus are not really competitors in my opinion as they have completely different focus.
Mockito and Citrus both are test frameworks, right but they have completely different goals in testing your software.
Mockito is used in unit testing with a more deep insight of classes and methods used so you can create a level of abstraction when testing a piece of your code. Citrus has focus on integration testing with messaging interfaces involved where your application under test is deployed somewhere in a shippable state and messages do really go over the wire.
At the moment you are doing unit testing not integration testing. Which is great! You need a lot of unit tests and Mockito is a really good choice to help you there. At some point you may want to test your software with focus on integration with other components in a production-like environment with completely different focus (non-functional requirements, deplyoment, configuration, messaging, security and so on). This is the time to go for integration testing to make sure that you meet the interfaces to other components and to make sure that others can call your services in a well designed way.
Which part of the testing train you need and which part you may want to stress in your project is totally based on the requirements and your software architecture.
Long sentence short I would recommend that you go three steps backwards in order to clarify what you want/need to test in your application and then pick the tools that help you to reach that goals.
I'm currently working a MVC 5 project using Entity Framework 5 (I may switch to 6 soon). I use database first and MySQL with an existing database (with about 40 tables). This project started as a “proof of concept” and now my company decided to go with the software I'm developing. I am struggling with the testing part.
My first idea was to use mostly integration tests. That way I felt that I can test my code and also my underlying database. I created a script that dumps the existing database schema into a “test database” in MySQL. I always start my tests with a clean database with no data and creates/delete a bit of data for each test. The thing is that it takes a fair amount of time when I run my tests (I run my tests very often).
I am thinking of replacing my integration tests with unit tests in order to speed up the time it takes to run them. I would “remove” the test database and only use mocks instead. I have tested a few methods and it seems to works great but I'm wondering:
Do you think mocking my database can “hide” bugs that can occur only when my code is running against a real database? Note that I don’t want to test Entity Framework (I'm sure the fine people from Microsoft did a great job on that), but can my code runs well against mocks and breaks against MySQL ?
Do you think going from integration testing to unit testing is a king of “downgrade”?
Do you think dropping Integration testing and adopting unit testing for speed consideration is ok.
I'm aware that some framework exists that run the tests against an in-memory database (i.e. Effort framework), but I don’t see the advantages of this vs mocking, what am I missing?
I'm aware that this kind of question is prone to “it depends of your needs” kind of responses but I'm sure some may have been through this and can share their knowledge. I'm also aware that in a perfect world I would do both (tests by using mocks and by using database) but I don’t have this kind of time.
As a side question what tool would you recommend for mocking. I was told that “moq” is a good framework but it’s a little bit slow. What do you think?
Do you think mocking my database can “hide” bugs that can occur only when my code is running against a real database? Note that I don’t want to test Entity Framework (I’m sure the fine people from Microsoft did a great job on that), but can my code runs well against mocks and breaks against MySQL ?
Yes, if you only test your code using Mocks, it's very easy for you to have false confidence in your code. When you're mocking the database, what you're doing is saying "I expect these calls to take place". If your code makes those calls, it'll pass the test, but if they're the wrong calls, it won't work in production. At a simple level, if you add / remove a column from your database the database interaction may need to change, but the process of adding/removing the column is hidden from your tests until you update the mocks.
Do you think going from integration testing to unit testing is a king of “downgrade”?
It's not a downgrade, it's different. Unit testing and integration testing have different benefits that in most cases will complement each other.
Do you think dropping Integration testing and adopting unit testing for speed consideration is ok.
Ok is very subjective. I'd say no, however you don't have to run all of your tests all of the time. Most testing frameworks (if not all) allow you to categorise your tests in some way. This allows you to create subsets of your tests, so you could for example have a "DatabaseIntegration" category that you put all of your database integration tests in, or "EndToEnd" for full end to end tests. My preferred approach is to have separate builds. The usual/continuous build that I would run before/after each check-in only runs unit tests. This gives quick feedback and validation that nothing has broken. A less common / daily / overnight build, in addition to running the unit tests, would also run slower / repeatable integration tests. I would also tend to run integration tests for areas that I've been working on before checking in the code if there's a possibility of the code impacting the integration.
I’m aware that some framework exists that run the tests against an in-memory database (i.e. Effort framework), but I don’t see the advantages of this vs mocking, what am I missing?
I haven't used them, so this is speculation. I would imagine the main benefit is that rather than having to simulate the database interaction with mocks, you instead setup the database and measure the post state. The tests become less how you did something and more what data moved. On the face of it, this could lead to less brittle tests, however you're effectively writing integration tests against another data provider that you're not going to use in production. If it's the right thing to do is again, very subjective.
I guess the second benefit is likely to be that you don't necessarily need to refactor your code in order to take advantage of the in memory database. If your code hasn't been constructed to support dependency injection then there is a good chance that you will need to perform some level of refactoring in order to support mocking.
I’m also aware that in a perfect world I would do both (tests by using mocks and by using database) but i don’t have this kind of time.
I don't really understand why you feel this is the case. You've already said that you have integration tests already that you're planning on replacing with unit tests. Unless you need to do major refactoring in order to support the unit-tests your integration tests should still work. You don't usually need as many integration tests as you need unit tests, since the unit tests are there to verify the functionality and the integration tests are there to verify the integration, so the overhead of creating them should be relatively small. Using categorisation to determine which tests you run will reduce the time impact of running your tests.
As a side question what tool would you recommend for mocking. I was told that “moq” is a good framework but it’s a little bit slow. What do you think?
I've used quite a few different mocking libraries and for the most part, they are all very similar. Some things are easier with different frameworks, but without knowing what you're doing it's hard to say if you will notice. If you haven't built your code with dependency injection in mind then you may have find it challenging getting your mocks to where you need them.
Mocking of any kind is generally quite fast, you're usually (unless you're using partial mocks) removing all of the functionality of the class/interface you're mocking so it's going to perform faster than your normal code. The only performance issues I've heard about are if you're MS fakes/shims, sometimes (depending on the complexity of the assembly being faked) it can take a while for the fake assemblies to be created.
The two frameworks I've used that are a bit different are MS fakes/shims and Typemock. The MS version requires a certain level of visual studio, but allows you to generate fake assemblies with shims of certain types of object that means you don't have to pass your mocks from your test through to where they're used. Typemock is a commercial solution that uses the profiling API to inject code while your tests are running which means it can reach parts other mocking frameworks can't. These are both particularly useful if you've got a codebase that hasn't been written with unit testing in mind that can help to bridge the gap.
This is regarding an issue I have been facing for sometime. Though I have found a solution, I really would like to get some opinion about the approach taken.
We have an application which receives messages from a host, does some processing and then pass that message on to an external system. This application is developed in Java and has to run on Linux/Oracle and HP-NonS top Tandem/SQLMX OS/DB combination.
I have developed a test automation framework which is written in Perl.This script traverses directories (specified as an argument to this script) and executes test cases specified under those directories. Test cases could be organized into directories as per functionality. This approach was taken to ensure that a specific functionality can also checked in addition to entire regression suite.For verification of the test results, script read test case specific input files which has sql queries mentioned in them.
In Linux/Oracle, Perl DBD/DBI interface is used to query Oracle database.
When this automation tool was run in Tandem, I came to know that there was no DBD/DBI interface for SQLMX. When we contacted HP, they informed us that it would be a while before they develop DBD/DBI interfaces for SQLMX DB.
To circumvent this issue, I developed a small Java application which accepts DB connection string, user name, password and various other parameters. This Java app is now responsible for test case verification functionality.
I must say it meets our current needs, but something tells me (do not know what) that approach taken is not a good one, though now I have the flexibility of running this automation with any DB which has a JDBC interface.
Can you please provide feedback on the above approach and suggest a better solution?
Thanks in advance
The question is a bit too broad to comment usefully on except for one part.
If the project is in Java, write the tests in Java. Writing the tests in a different language adds all sorts of complications.
You have to maintain another programming language and attendant libraries. They can have different caveats and bugs for the same actions, such as you ran into with a lack of a database driver in a certain environment.
Having the tests done in a different language than the project is developed in drives a wedge between testing and development. Developers will not feel responsible for participating in the testing process because they don't even know the language.
With the tests written in a different language, they cannot leverage any work which has already been done. They have to write all over again basic code to access and work with the data and services, doubling the work and doubling the bugs. If the project code changes APIs or data structures, the test code can easily fall out of sync requiring extra maintenance hassles.
Java already has well developed testing tools to do what you want. The whole structure of running specific tests vs the whole test suite is built into test suites like jUnit.
So I can underscore the point, I wrote Test::More and I'm recommending you not use it here.
As many of you are aware as of the release of MatLab 2013a, xUnit a popular unit testing framework for MatLab is canceling further development.
Is MatLab's new and native unit testing framework comparable to xUnit? what features is it lacking when compared to xUnit? Is it better or worse than xUnit?
MATLAB xUnit has been an excellent contribution to the test focused development efforts of those writing MATLAB code. It has a solid implementation, it follows the xUnit paradigm very well, and has been invaluable as a file exchange contribution.
The MATLAB Unit Test framework has indeed learned from this submission as well as decades of requirements and test focused development for the MathWorks' internal code base. We have also learned and extended upon frameworks in other languages such as JUnit, NUnit, and python's unittest framework. As such there certainly are many more features in the R2013a-beyond framework, and it is designed to scale and extend.
There are too many other features to go into in a simple answer, but perhaps one way to describe some of the differences are that the 13a framework is what I loosely call an "xUnit 2.0" and the file exchange submissions is an "xUnit 1.0" framework. If you are familair with JUnit, this is like the difference between JUnit 3 and JUnit 4.
There are also other intangible or as yet unrealized benefits, such as:
The framework is included directly in MATLAB so you can share tests with others and know that they can run the tests even if they are not familiar with testing and do not want to download the file exchange framework.
The framework is under active development with a pipeline of additional features and capabilities in the works for future releases.
Hope that helps. I would be happy to go over any questions you have about specific functionality or features.
I don't believe MathWorks are planning at all to stop making xUnit available, so you can continue using it if you like. xUnit had not seen any large changes for quite a while in any case, and even though it won't be developed further in terms of features, it may receive an occasional fix if any are needed.
I have tried out the new framework quite a bit, but have not used it on any large projects yet. Previously I have used xUnit on large projects. However, I'm no expert on unit testing - so please read the following opinions in that context.
I'm pretty sure there's nothing you can do in xUnit that you can't do in the new framework. In general it's much more flexible and powerful than xUnit, providing additional features and a better way to organise and structure your tests. It's a lot easier to set up and tear down suites of tests, to manage and close resources (files, figure windows, database connections etc), and to carry out tricky tests such as checking that the right number of arguments are returned.
However, whereas a typical xUnit test was implemented as a fairly simple MATLAB function, tests in the new framework are typically implemented (in 13a, but see below for 13b) as classes using MATLAB's OO syntax, and if you're not comfortable with that it may seem like a big leap.
I should also add that although the documentation for the testing framework is excellent as reference material, I haven't found it to be great as a tutorial.
In 13b, the need to use classes has been offset a bit with the introduction of the functiontests command, which creates a test suite for you from a file containing tests implemented as local functions. That will make things much easier if you're not comfortable with class syntax. But I would think that if you want to take advantage of everything, you'd probably still want to use the main framework.
Hope my experience is of help - if you're lucky, perhaps #AndyCampbell will chime in...
I usually made php forms and "try" to use "good practices" in them.
I'm concerned about the real safety and error-free of that forms and I want to do some tests simulating the customer behavior, and I do it manually, but I find that is a hard work specially when the form is large and I know that there are a lot of combinations that I can't test, so usually I find bugs in the production phase.
Is there a tool that do this? I listened about Selenium, did somebody use it in the way I need? Or how can I create my own test tools that simulate user inputs at random?
User inputs implies: not filling/checking all the fields, putting in invalid data, using differents setups (no javascript, browser versions, ...), SQL injections, and I don't know so more...
You'll need to consider a combination of approaches here: good test case design, data driving those tests with various input combinations, and an automation tool such as Selenium, WebDriver, Telerik's Test Studio (commercial tool I help promote), or some other automation tool.
Design your test cases such that you're focusing on groups of behavior (a successful path case, a case validating invalid input, a case validating protection against SQL injection, etc.). Then you can look to (perhaps) data drive those test cases with sets of inputs and expected results. You can randomize that as needed through your test case code.
Most good functional automation tools support multiple browsers running the same test script, so that's a good help for hitting multi-browser testing.
Above all, start your automation efforts with small steps and focus first on high-value tests. Don't spend time trying to automate everything because that costs you a lot of time.
Selenium is used to automate browsers in exactly the way you described.
Its used for what is called Functional Testing. Where you test the external aspects of an application to ensure that they meet the specifications.
Its is most often combined with unit tests that test the internal aspects. For example to test that your application is safe against different forms of SQL injection.
Each programming language usually has several different frameworks for writing unit tests.
This are often used together this with an approach called test driven development (TDD) where you write the tests before the application code.