What is the most commonly used approach used for testing in Java projects (iterative development) ?
My suggestion is that you should have a healthy mix of automated and manual testing.
AUTOMATED TESTING
Unit Testing
Use NUnit to test your classes, functions and interaction between them.
http://www.nunit.org/index.php
Automated Functional Testing
If it's possible you should automate a lot of the functional testing. Some frame works have functional testing built into them. Otherwise you have to use a tool for it. If you are developing web sites/applications you might want to look at Selenium.
http://www.peterkrantz.com/2005/selenium-for-aspnet/
Continuous Integration
Use CI to make sure all your automated tests run every time someone in your team makes a commit to the project.
http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html
MANUAL TESTING
As much as I love automated testing it is, IMHO, not a substitute for manual testing. The main reason being that an automated can only do what it is told and only verify what it has been informed to view as pass/fail. A human can use it's intelligence to find faults and raise questions that appear while testing something else.
Exploratory Testing
ET is a very low cost and effective way to find defects in a project. It take advantage of the intelligence of a human being and a teaches the testers/developers more about the project than any other testing technique i know of. Doing an ET session aimed at every feature deployed in the test environment is not only an effective way to find problems fast, but also a good way to learn and fun!
http://www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf
Personal experience would suggest the most popular approach is none at all.
I've worked with TDD (Test Driven Development) before, and my feelings towards it are mixed. Essentially, you write your tests before you write your code, and write your code to satisfy the requirements of the test. TDD forces you to have an extremely clear idea about your requirements prior to starting. An added benefit is that, once you are done development, assuming you followed closely to TDD procedures, you'd have a complete set of test suites to go with the code. The down side is that it takes an extremely long time, and at times, you'd just want to skip a couple of steps (e.g. maybe writing code before tests like a sane person would prefer to do).
More can be read here (wiki link)
Unit testing?
Contract-based programming, a la Eiffel?
Waterfall model?
Different shops do different things. If there were one method to rule them all, you wouldn't be asking this question.
On the premise of doing testing at all, I would say that testing with JUnit is the common approach to do testing in Java.
Although most tests are written with JUnit mostly tests tend to be more integration tests than unit tests. (meaning not testing one thing in isolation but some things together)
Additionally test are mostly not written in a test first approach but in parallel or after a specific feature has been implemented.
If you go to a team that makes more advanced use of testing you might probably find some CI Server (Cruise Control, Hudson) running the tests at least once a day during a nightly build.
In the order of most commonly used approach:
no tests at all
manual tests: running the app,
clicking or providing input, check
results
try to write some JUnits, forget
about them, slide to 2 and 1
Start with TDD, see that it's hard
then slide to 3, 2 and 1
on the theoretical side there are loads of ways to properly test the code.
If you are looking for something practical take a look at
Clean Code Talk. Take a look at the whole series, about 5 talks (can't post more than one link).
My Suggestion for testing of the java project is to keep it simple.
Steps :-
Manual Testing :-Achieve a stable product.
Automation Testing :- Maintain the quality of the product.
Report Generation and reporting :- Let people know the quality of the product.
Continuous Integration :-Make it a complete automated,continuous tool.
When developer will commit the Functionality then Start testing the it module by module.Try to compare the Actual Output with the expected output and against that Log the issues.
When developer resolved with the issues,Start with the Integration Testing and also start testing the resolved state issues and check whether any regression occur due to issue Fixing.
At last when product become the stable one,Then start for automating the the modules.
You can also follow automation step by step like:-
1.Automating the modules.
2.Report generation and send mail for product HealthCheck.
3.Continuous Integration and Automation testing on private server on local machine.
Related
I'd like to ask what's the practical difference between Cucumber and JUnit. I haven't worked with Cucumber at all; found some documentation but I'd greatly appreciate some feedback from someone who has worked with both (interested in a high lvl overview).
To break it down - what i'm interested in (I'll be using Selenium and not Protractor) :
Are there any things that Cucumber can't do vs Junit.
What's easier to use (coding, how fast you can write the tests) ?
Both work with Page Objects?
Some things that i need to get done
Test css styling
Test page responsiveness
Standard operation on WebElements (clicking, getting data etc)
Asserts.
Anything in addition to this is more than welcomed. Greatly appreciate your answer on this, thank you!
JUnit and Cucumber are aiming at different goals. They are rather complement to each other than replace each other.
Are there any things that Cucumber can't do vs Junit.
There isn't anything you can do with JUnit that you can't do with Cucumber. And the other way around.
The difference is that while JUnit aims at tests, Cucumber aims at collaboration with non technical people. Non technical people will not understand what a unit test does. They will, however, be able to understand and validate an example written in Gherkin.
What's easier to use (coding, how fast you can write the tests) ?
There is more overhead when you use Cucumber. You will have to implement each step as a method and not just one test method as you would do if you used JUnit. The readability you gain from expressing examples using plain text is sometimes worth the extra work.
Both work with Page Objects?
Page Objects are an abstraction for the web page you are verifying. It is a class you write as developer/tester. The Page Objects can be used by both JUnit and Cucumber. In fact, there is no difference between the tools from that perspective.
The choice to use JUnit or Cucumber is a matter of granularity and audience.
A work flow that works well is to mix the tools. Define examples of how the application should work using BDD, (Cucumber, Gherkin). Implement these scenarios using Cucumber. Then, use JUnit to work out details that may be important but not necessary important for the business stakeholders at a high level. Think of corner cases that are important but are too much details for your stakeholders.
An image that describes this mix is available here: https://cucumber.io/images/home/bdd-cycle.png
I wrote blog post a while back where I talk about the right tool for the job: http://www.thinkcode.se/blog/2016/07/25/the-right-tool-for-the-job
The right tool may be Cucumber. It can also be JUnit. It all depends on your audience.
Simply spoken, those two work on completely different levels of abstraction.
JUnit is mainly an automation framework; giving you the ability to rapidly write down test cases using the Java programming language. It provides annotations that make to easily declare: "this method over here is a JUnit test". It was intended as framework for unit tests; but many people also use it to drive full scale "integration" or "function" tests.
Cucumber on the other hand works on a much higher level of abstraction. You start by writing "test descriptions" in pure text. Leading to probably the key difference: you don't need a to know Java to write a cucumber test (you just need a java programmer to provide the "glue code" that allows Cucumber to turn your text input into some executable piece of code).
In that sense, you are somehow asking us to compare apples and turnips here; as one would be using these two toolsets for a different set of "problem solution". But as lined out; you can also use JUnit to drive "bigger" tests; so the main differentiation between these two tools is the level of abstraction that you are dealing with.
EDIT: your comment is correct; as those tools are for different "settings", you shouldn't expect that a non-technical person alone will be able to use cucumber to write good tests covering everything. Cucumber is a nice way to enable non-technical participation for creating tests; but in the end, you are solving technical (java related) problems; thus you need Java programming expertise at some point. Either "within the same person"; or at least within different people in your team.
Cucumber seems to make something more user friendly but I don't think business analysts really care what it is. Ultimately developers have to write unit tests, integration tests , cucumber tests (so Cucumber makes no sense for developer who has already written unit tests & integration tests & Business analyst don't care because they have already provided what they want).
How to write a unit test framework?
Can anyone suggest some good reading?
I wish to work on basic building blocks that we use as programmers, so I am thinking of working on developing a unit test framework for Java.
I don't intend to write a framework that will replace junit;
my intention is to gain some experience by doing a worthy project.
There are several books that describe how to build a unit test framework. One of those is Test-Driven Development: By Example (TDD) by Kent Beck. Another book you might look at is xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code by Gerard Meszaros.
Why do you want to build your own unit test framework?
Which ones have you tried and what did you find that was missing?
If (as your comments suggest) your objective is to learn about the factors that go into making a good unit test framework by doing it yourself, then chapters 18-24 (Part II: The xUnit Example) of the TDD book show how it can be done in Python. Adapting that to Java would probably teach you quite a lot about Python, unit testing frameworks and possibly Java too.
It will still be valuable to you to have some experience with some unit test framework so that you can compare what you produce with what others have produced. Who knows, you might have some fundamental insight that they've missed and you may improve things for everyone. (It isn't very likely, I'm sorry to say, but it is possible.)
Note that the TDD people are quite adamant that TDD does not work well with databases. That is a nuisance to me as my work is centred on DBMS development; it means I have to adapt the techniques usually espoused in the literature to accommodate the realities of 'testing whether the DBMS works does mean testing against a DBMS'. I believe that the primary reason for their concern is that setting up a database to a known state takes time, and therefore makes testing slower. I can understand that concern - it is a practical problem.
Basically, it consists of three parts:
preparing set of tests
running tests
making reports
Preparing set of tests means that your framework should collect all tests which you want to run. You can specify these tests (usually classes with test methods which satisfy some convention or marked with certain annotation or implement marker interface) in a separate file (java or xml), or you can find them dynamically (making a search over classpath).
If you choose the dynamic searching, then you'll probably have to use some libraries which can analyse java bytecode. Otherwise you'll have to load all the classes in your classpath, and this a) requires much time and b) will execute all static initializers of loaded classes and can cause unexpected tests results.
Running tests can vary significantly depending on features of your framework. The simplest way is just calling test methods inside a try/catch block, analysing and saving results (you have to analyze 2 situations - when the assertion exception was thrown and when it was not thrown).
Making reports is all about printing analyzed results in xml/html/wiki or whatever else format.
The Cook's Tour is written by Kent Beck (I believe; it's not attributed), and describes the thought process that went into writing JUnit. I would suggest reading it and considering how you might choose an alternate line of development.
I'm using eclipse in a Java environment. I have to introduce testing to an already underway project. How to start? Unit tests on the classes, and what else? What are the best tools for the job (considering I'm using eclipse)? TestNG, JUnit, JTiger?
How do I make others adapt themselves to use the tests?
Thanks in advance!
Eclipse has a great support of JUnit. This looks like a great starting point. I would add a new source directory test and create a package structure mirroring your src folder. Then you can add your unit tests one by one. Good luck!
Unless your team already is used to writing tests, testing all old components is not really feasible (sometimes not even then), as writing testable software requires a specific mentality.
I think, the best time to start writing tests is when you can define some new component that is critical enough to warrant the extra effort, but somehow new, so the already existing code base would not be tested as much.
This way you could find a testing approach, identify the benefits and learning the mentality without putting too much effort in something that might not work for your team.
About tooling: I sadly cannot really compare the different tools, as I only have experience with JUnit.
JUnit is easy to start with, as the corresponding tooling is already included in Eclipse (wizards to create templates, running and evaluation options...), and there are plenty of documentation and examples available on the net.
A lot of good questions.
If your project does not tests at all and already underway you should introduce the tests incrementally. When you have to develop a new feature write test for this feature, classes that you are going to change and features that could be broken. The same is when you are fixing bugs. First write test that reproduces the bug, then fix it.
I used JUnit and TestNG. Both are almost the same. TestNG has groups, i.e. you can mark test to be belong to group like development, build, integration, etc. This is mostly relevant if you have a lot of tests and it takes significant time to run them all.
Do you already have automatic build? If not start from this. If you prefer to use maven it is relatively simple. When your build is ready write a couple of unit tests (just to have something to fail...)
Then install Hudson/Jenkins and define your project there. People will see how cool is it that once you commit your new code the build runs almost immediately and you see all failed tests. Probably try to show the strength of TDD to your boss and try to explain him that he should force all team members to write tests.
If you have enough energy introduce Sonar to your company. People will see how awful the code that they are writing and how poor the test coverage is. The they will see how quickly the test coverage is growing up and will probably invest more into unit testing.
Shortly, good luck. You are on the right way.
JUnit and TestNG are both fine. TestNG has more capabilities and can be helpful with integration tests, JUnit is more focused on unit tests.
You may want to get acquainted with some kind of mocking library like Mockito. Code coverage tools like Cobertura and continuous integration tools like Jenkins are great too.
Using a DI framework like Spring or Guice is helpful for writing more easily-testable code. Whether you use a DI framework or not, the more loosely-coupled your code the easier it is to test. Since your project is already under way it is probably too late for this part, which will make your task harder.
It can be very hard to get co-workers to cooperate with testing. You may want to introduce it selectively on pieces where it can make the most difference. Writing tests for already-finished functionality is usually painful and a waste of time. Tests should be small, have few dependencies, be understandable, and should run quickly. The more painful it is to write tests, run the tests, and fix broken tests, the more resistance you will get.
I would like to make integration tests and system tests for my applications but producing good integration and system tests have often needed so much effort that I have not bothered. The few times I tried, I wrote custom, application-specific test harnesses, which felt like re-inventing the wheel each time. I wonder if this is the wrong approach. Is there a "standard" approach to integration and full system testing?
EDIT: To clarify, it's automated tests, for desktop and web applications. Ideally a complete test suite that exercises the full functionality of the application.
If by "make integration tests and system tests" you mean automated tests, then the answer is no, there is no standard approach. What approach choose will depend on:
the characteristics of the application (e.g. does it have a GUI?, is it read only?, how many external dependencies does it have, etc)
what you are trying to test (maybe you only need GUI tests, or perhaps the opposite is true and you don't really care about the GUI but the internal logic is critical)
how quickly you want to see the results (e.g. the more you stub out the faster your tests become)
the skillsets on your team
Personally, I love any approach that integrates with JUnit. JUnit is a fantastic framework which is well supported and easily tied into a continuous intergration server. Here are a few possible approaches:
Selenium with JUnit - Fantastic tool for driving web applications
Concordion - for all application types. Integrates with JUnit and allows plain english specifications of tests. Your 'fixture'/test code will hook into key words in the specification and assert or perform actions on them.
FEST - for swing applications, again it integrates with JUnit (see a theme yet? ;) (more choices here)
The above examples provide a tremendous amount of out of the box help for testing. Of course, they still require effort to wire to your application and maintain, but the advantages are well worth it. In addition to the above, you may need to be thinking about how to stub or mock out areas of your application. Perhaps you want to do all of your testing "under the GUI" or "above the database". In the first scenario, you'll need your tests to start at the points in your code where the GUI would interact with it and in the latter you'll need to stub out the services which interact with your database.
Point being, there's lots of ways to do this. Best start with a very clear understanding of what you want to get out of your testing. Then learn what existing frameworks are out there to help you based on what you want to test, and finally, don't try to conquer the world in a night. Start small getting a few tests running. Get the green bar (always a joy to see!) Get a stable proven platform for testing and make sure you're happy with it. Then add more as you go along.
I'm looking into how best to automate integration tests (by which I mean complete use cases entirely within our application)
The questions
Correct Approach for Unit Testing Complex Interactions
What are the pros and cons of automated Unit Tests vs automated Integration tests?
cover the "why" and "what" aspects very well.
The question Automated integration testing a C++ app with a database implies that xUnit frameworks are a good way to create and execute integration tests. Are xUnit's really well suited to that task? Are there common gotcha's to be aware of? A good approach to follow?
Are there better approaches (short of possibly purchasing the HP / former Mercury tool suite)?
My specific environment for this project is Java / SpringSource / Hibernate but am also interested in suggestions for the .Net platform.
The question Automated integration testing a C++ app with a database implies that xUnit frameworks are a good way to create and execute integration tests. Are xUnit's really well suited to that task? Are there common gotcha's to be aware of? A good approach to follow?
JUnit and TestNG are initially unit testing frameworks but can be used for integration testing as well. So to me, the answer is yes, they are well suited for integration testing, e.g. testing the service --> domain > persistence --> database layers (I'll actually come back on integration testing later). One of the tricky things when doing integration tests that involve the database is the data. A tool such as DbUnit can help and is typically used to put the database in a known state before to run each test (and to perform asserts on the database content). Another approach is to run the tests in a transaction and to rollback the transaction at the end of the test. Spring allows to do that very easily, so does the unitils library. In any case, a best practice is to avoid interdependent tests as much as possible (as mentioned in the link you gave), they are just a nightmare.
Are there better approaches (short of possibly purchasing the HP / former Mercury tool suite)?
To my knowledge, such tools are more end-to-end testing tools i.e. functional testing tools. So if by integration tests (which for me mean testing several components together) you actually mean functional tests (this is my understanding of complete use cases), I'd suggest to look at things like:
Abbot, Marathon, Frankenstein, etc for Swing applications
iMacros, Selenium, Cucumber, etc for Web applications
SoapUI for Web Services
Pay a special attention to the one in bold (all are actually great tools but I'm sure the one in bold provide good automation capabilities). And because HTTP and SOAP are standards (this doesn't apply to the Swing UI testing tools of course), these tools are not really Java specific (even if the tests themselves are written in Java/Groovy for SoapUI). And BTW, Selenium supports many programming languages).
Multi-threading can be a problem, since JUnit won't pick up exceptions in other threads. There are some Java Puzzlers about that. You also need to invent your own ways of doing statistical testing and the assert methods can be a bit rough. I also think that the semantics of JUnit are a bit unclear (JUnit uses one separate instance per test method for instance). For these reasons I switched to TestNG, which in my opinion is a better designed framework. The fact that JUnit was designed using extreme programming shows sometimes.
As mentioned you can do it with xUnit frameworks, but if you will want to mix Java and .Net, or web applications and desktop applications or add some more complexity to overall picture, than you won't be able to do it with just one unit test framework. So you will need to have many test tools, many test environments, many test script developers (for example one foe Java unit tests, one for .Net tests)... and this will add up complexity, troubles, costs...
As for HP Quick Test Pro you mentioned it should cover most of your needs. I mean most, because there may be some areas where it is not suitable (no way to run scripts on applications via Citrix virtualization), but for the most cases it will do the job. It is suitable for java/.net/web and other things (there are plugins for specialized uses). QTP usually operates on GUI objects so you can prepare test cases for user use cases, and test can be performed in a manner that normal user would perform actions (just a bit faster you have to intentionally slow it down to user speed if needed).
You will probably you will need one tool, one test environment, one test scrip developer (VB). It is expensive, but if it is for company it should be better choice in the long run.
And if you ask from company perspective it will play well with HP Quality Center if you decide to use it for your whole Testing division/team. Unless you use IBM solutions, than they have their own tool suite as part of their software Delivery Platform including Rational Robot