Why Am I Writing This Test?

Billy Korando Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Effective Automated Testing With Spring Series, Testing Leave a Comment

… The highlight of this episode for me was when Dan laid out the three major concerns of automated tests. I hadn’t previously heard all the major purposes for automated testing laid out in such a succinct fashion. They are paraphrased:

Using Tests to Specify the Requirements of the System
Using Tests to Document the System
Using Tests to Build Confidence in the System

With purpose in mind, it is good practice for both developers and automated testers to ask themselves the following questions when writing a test: Why am I writing this test? Am I specifying system requirements? Documenting system behavior? Building confidence in the system? I’m a firm believer that asking the right questions when writing tests can lead to a better design for individual tests, in addition to more coherent and effective automated test suites.

In this article, we look into the three major purposes for writing automated unit tests. We discuss how they should be approached and what developers and automated testers can do right now to establish better, more purposeful, practices. 

Encouraging Good Behavior with JUnit 5 Test Interfaces

Billy Korando Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Effective Automated Testing With Spring Series, Java, Spring, Testing 2 Comments

JUnit 5, released in September of 2017, is the first major release for the popular JUnit testing framework in a little over a decade. I recently presented on JUnit 5 at Lava One Conf in Hawaii in January. If you have heard about JUnit 5, but are not yet familiar with it, you can check out my presentation here, as well as the JUnit 5 User Guides.

While researching for my presentation, one new feature in JUnit 5 really caught my eye was the ability to declare tests on default methods in interfaces. This feature caught my eye because two issues I frequently face are encouraging developers to write automated tests and promoting consistent patterns across the enterprise. In this article we are going to look at how test interfaces can help accomplish both of these goals.