12/11/12 7 Mistakes of Software Testing | Agile Zone

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Humble and Martin Fowler. Learn more about their FREE Continuous Delivery toolchain.
Though most developers know the importance of testing, it seems that a lot of them still arent testing
enough. And if they write tests, they just test wrong.
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If some tests are written in applications, most of them will be unit tests. Its easy to test a utility class
by just calling all utility methods, passing some values and checking if the expected result is returned.
A first mistake arises here. Most people dont think out of the box, or not enough. You can test that 1 +
1 =2 , that 2 + 1 = 3 and that 3 + 1 = 4. But whats the benefit of doing almost the same test 3 times?
Its better to test the boundary cases. Are the arguments of the sum( ) method primitive types or
Objects? If they are Objects, what happens if you pass null values? If an exception is thrown, is that
the expected one? Does it clearly tell what the problem is?
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If for example the service layer is unit tested, all other components like the DAO layer should be
mocked. In many cases this is done manually. Thats a second mistake.
By mocking stuff manually your mocks are thightly coupled to the implementation. Its much better to
use mocking frameworks. They are made for it. Just trust that they will create the mocks the way you
want. Some mocking frameworks are capable of doing more than others, some are easier to use than
others. My favourite mocking framework is Mockito because of its power and simplicity. EasyMock is
by far the best known but imo a bit too complex to use. What was the sequence again? Expect, replay,
assert, or ?
So its not only a matter of choosing a mocking framework. Its also a matter of choosing the right one.
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12/11/12 7 Mistakes of Software Testing | Agile Zone
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Integration tests are tests over different integrated parts of an application while unit tests only tests a
LUW (logical unit of work). The best known type of integration tests are tests of the DAO layer. In
these tests, multiple things are validated: the input parameters, the use of the ORM tool, the
correctness of the generated query (functional), if the DB can be accessed, the fact that the query is
working and the fact that the correct ResultSet is returned.
A third mistake that is made often is that developers provide test data in a dbUnit XML dataset. This
data is most of the time no representation of live data. The best way to handle this is to make
functional people provide and maintain this test data. Because you dont want to make them struggle
with a specific XML format, its a good practice to use the XlsDataSet format. Data can be provided in
an Excel sheet. The name of the tab is the table, in the first row, each column contains the name of
the column and in all other rows, effective data is added. Insertion into the DB will be done tab per tab,
from left to right. Deletion is done the other way around.
FUNCTIONAL TESTS
Functional test are forgotten too often because the perception is that they are difficult and costly to
maintain. Its true that youll have to tweak them to make them maintainable but executing all the same
tests manually over and over again will cost much more. Also when functionality is tested and
automated by means of continuous integration, theres no need for stress for screens/functionality that
will be broken in the next release.
Selenium is a great framework that is able to record functionality in the browser. Afourth mistake is
made here. Most people will just record and replay the tests the way they are. Selenium keeps tracks
of HTML components by their HTML id. If you dont specify ids in your HTML code, they can easily
change if a page is updated. This will break the tests immediately even when functionality still works.
A fifth mistake is made by just pasting the recorded test in a JUnit test. Common functionality like
login and logout, the time to wait for a response, should be added to a higher level. For example, a
login can be done before each test, afterwards a logout is done. This way, if something changes in
login or logout functionality, tests wont break.
A sixth mistake is the absence of testing logical flows. Its perfectly possible that an insert, a search,
an update, and a delete work on their own but that the complete flow from the creation, search, update
until delete of the same entry wont work. TestSuites are a great way to group multiple tests and run
them in sequence all together.
BDD
Mistake number seven: most of the tests are technical tests instead of functional tests. Its much
more important to test logical behaviour than to test if the things work technically. That can be done by
means of Behavior Driven Design.
Given some things, when an event occurs, then what should be the outcome? Mockito has some great
stuff to easily write tests in a BDD way.
Published at DZone with permission of Glenn Dejaeger, author and DZone MVB. (source)
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
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