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Table of Contents

Testing

General best practices

For testing please follow our general best practices:

  • Tests should have a clear goal that should also be documented.

  • Tests have to be classified into different integration levels.

  • Tests should follow a clear naming convention.

  • Automated tests need to properly assert the result of the tested operation(s) in a reliable way. E.g. avoid stuff like assertThat(service.getAllEntities()).hasSize(42) or even worse tests that have no assertion at all.

  • Tests need to be independent of each other. Never write test-cases or tests (in Java @Test methods) that depend on another test to be executed before.

  • Use AssertJ to write good readable and maintainable tests that also provide valuable feedback in case a test fails. Do not use legacy JUnit methods like assertEquals anymore!

  • For easy understanding divide your test in three commented sections:

    • //given

    • //when

    • //then

  • Plan your tests and test data management properly before implementing.

  • Instead of having a too strong focus on test coverage better ensure you have covered your critical core functionality properly and review the code including tests.

  • Test code shall NOT be seen as second class code. You shall consider design, architecture and code-style also for your test code but do not over-engineer it.

  • Test automation is good but should be considered in relation to cost per use. Creating full coverage via automated system tests can cause a massive amount of test-code that can turn out as a huge maintenance hell. Always consider all aspects including product life-cycle, criticality of use-cases to test, and variability of the aspect to test (e.g. UI, test-data).

  • Use continuous integration and establish that the entire team wants to have clean builds and running tests.

  • Prefer delegation over inheritance for cross-cutting testing functionality. Good places to put this kind of code can be realized and reused via the JUnit @Rule mechanism.

Test Automation Technology Stack

For test automation we use JUnit. However, we are strictly doing all assertions with AssertJ. For mocking we use Mockito. In order to mock remote connections we use WireMock.

For testing entire components or sub-systems we recommend to use for Spring stack spring-boot-starter-test as lightweight and fast testing infrastructure that is already shipped with devon4j-test. For Quarkus, you can add the necessary extensions manually such as quarkus-junit5, quarkus-junit5-mockito, assertj-core etc.

In case you have to use a full blown JEE application server, we recommend to use arquillian. To get started with arquillian, look here.

Test Doubles

We use test doubles as generic term for mocks, stubs, fakes, dummies, or spys to avoid confusion. Here is a short summary from stubs VS mocks:

  • Dummy objects specifying no logic at all. May declare data in a POJO style to be used as boiler plate code to parameter lists or even influence the control flow towards the test’s needs.

  • Fake objects actually have working implementations, but usually take some shortcut which makes them not suitable for production (an in memory database is a good example).

  • Stubs provide canned answers to calls made during the test, usually not responding at all to anything outside what’s programmed in for the test. Stubs may also record information about calls, such as an email gateway stub that remembers the messages it 'sent', or maybe only how many messages it 'sent'.

  • Mocks are objects pre-programmed with expectations, which form a specification of the calls they are expected to receive.

We try to give some examples, which should make it somehow clearer:

Stubs

Best Practices for applications:

  • A good way to replace small to medium large boundary systems, whose impact (e.g. latency) should be ignored during load and performance tests of the application under development.

  • As stub implementation will rely on state-based verification, there is the threat, that test developers will partially reimplement the state transitions based on the replaced code. This will immediately lead to a black maintenance whole, so better use mocks to assure the certain behavior on interface level.

  • Do NOT use stubs as basis of a large amount of test cases as due to state-based verification of stubs, test developers will enrich the stub implementation to become a large monster with its own hunger after maintenance efforts.

Mocks

Best Practices for applications:

  • Replace not-needed dependencies of your system-under-test (SUT) to minimize the application context to start of your component framework.

  • Replace dependencies of your SUT to impact the control flow under test without establishing all the context parameters needed to match the control flow.

  • Remember: Not everything has to be mocked! Especially on lower levels of tests like isolated module tests you can be betrayed into a mocking delusion, where you end up in a hundred lines of code mocking the whole context and five lines executing the test and verifying the mocks behavior. Always keep in mind the benefit-cost ratio, when implementing tests using mocks.

WireMock

If you need to mock remote connections such as HTTP-Servers, WireMock offers easy to use functionality. For a full description see the homepage or the github repository. Wiremock can be used either as a JUnit Rule, in Java outside of JUnit or as a standalone process. The mocked server can be configured to respond to specific requests in a given way via a fluent Java API, JSON files and JSON over HTTP. An example as an integration to JUnit can look as follows.

import static com.github.tomakehurst.wiremock.core.WireMockConfiguration.wireMockConfig;
import com.github.tomakehurst.wiremock.junit.WireMockRule;

public class WireMockOfferImport{

  @Rule
  public WireMockRule mockServer = new WireMockRule(wireMockConfig().dynamicPort());

  @Test
  public void requestDataTest() throws Exception {
  int port = this.mockServer.port();
  ...}

This creates a server on a randomly chosen free port on the running machine. You can also specify the port to be used if wanted. Other than that there are several options to further configure the server. This includes HTTPs, proxy settings, file locations, logging and extensions.

  @Test
  public void requestDataTest() throws Exception {
      this.mockServer.stubFor(get(urlEqualTo("/new/offers")).withHeader("Accept", equalTo("application/json"))
      .withHeader("Authorization", containing("Basic")).willReturn(aResponse().withStatus(200).withFixedDelay(1000)
      .withHeader("Content-Type", "application/json").withBodyFile("/wireMockTest/jsonBodyFile.json")));
  }

This will stub the URL localhost:port/new/offers to respond with a status 200 message containing a header (Content-Type: application/json) and a body with content given in jsonBodyFile.json if the request matches several conditions. It has to be a GET request to ../new/offers with the two given header properties.

Note that by default files are located in src/test/resources/__files/. When using only one WireMock server one can omit the this.mockServer in before the stubFor call (static method). You can also add a fixed delay to the response or processing delay with WireMock.addRequestProcessingDelay(time) in order to test for timeouts.

WireMock can also respond with different corrupted messages to simulate faulty behaviour.

@Test(expected = ResourceAccessException.class)
public void faultTest() {

    this.mockServer.stubFor(get(urlEqualTo("/fault")).willReturn(aResponse()
    .withFault(Fault.MALFORMED_RESPONSE_CHUNK)));
...}

A GET request to ../fault returns an OK status header, then garbage, and then closes the connection.

Integration Levels

There are many discussions about the right level of integration for test automation. Sometimes it is better to focus on small, isolated modules of the system - whatever a "module" may be. In other cases it makes more sense to test integrated groups of modules. Because there is no universal answer to this question, devonfw only defines a common terminology for what could be tested. Each project must make its own decision where to put the focus of test automation. There is no worldwide accepted terminology for the integration levels of testing. In general we consider ISTQB. However, with a technical focus on test automation we want to get more precise.

The following picture shows a simplified view of an application based on the devonfw reference architecture. We define four integration levels that are explained in detail below. The boxes in the picture contain parenthesized numbers. These numbers depict the lowest integration level, a box belongs to. Higher integration levels also contain all boxes of lower integration levels. When writing tests for a given integration level, related boxes with a lower integration level must be replaced by test doubles or drivers.

Integration Levels

The main difference between the integration levels is the amount of infrastructure needed to test them. The more infrastructure you need, the more bugs you will find, but the more instable and the slower your tests will be. So each project has to make a trade-off between pros and contras of including much infrastructure in tests and has to select the integration levels that fit best to the project.

Consider, that more infrastructure does not automatically lead to a better bug-detection. There may be bugs in your software that are masked by bugs in the infrastructure. The best way to find those bugs is to test with very few infrastructure.

External systems do not belong to any of the integration levels defined here. devonfw does not recommend involving real external systems in test automation. This means, they have to be replaced by test doubles in automated tests. An exception may be external systems that are fully under control of the own development team.

The following chapters describe the four integration levels.

Level 1 Module Test

The goal of a isolated module test is to provide fast feedback to the developer. Consequently, isolated module tests must not have any interaction with the client, the database, the file system, the network, etc.

An isolated module test is testing a single classes or at least a small set of classes in isolation. If such classes depend on other components or external resources, etc. these shall be replaced with a test double.

public class MyClassTest extends ModuleTest {

  @Test
  public void testMyClass() {

    // given
    MyClass myClass = new MyClass();
    // when
    String value = myClass.doSomething();
    // then
    assertThat(value).isEqualTo("expected value");
  }

}

For an advanced example see here.

Level 2 Component Test

A component test aims to test components or component parts as a unit. These tests can access resources such as a database (e.g. for DAO tests). Further, no remote communication is intended here. Access to external systems shall be replaced by a test double.

  • For Spring stack, they are typically run with a (light-weight) infrastructure such as spring-boot-starter-test. A component-test is illustrated in the following example:

    @SpringBootTest(classes = { MySpringBootApp.class }, webEnvironment = WebEnvironment.NONE)
public class UcFindCountryTest extends ComponentTest {
  @Inject
  private UcFindCountry ucFindCountry;

  @Test
  public void testFindCountry() {

    // given
    String countryCode = "de";

    // when
    TestUtil.login("user", MyAccessControlConfig.FIND_COUNTRY);
    CountryEto country = this.ucFindCountry.findCountry(countryCode);

    // then
    assertThat(country).isNotNull();
    assertThat(country.getCountryCode()).isEqualTo(countryCode);
    assertThat(country.getName()).isEqualTo("Germany");
  }
}

    This test will start the entire spring-context of your app (MySpringBootApp). Within the test spring will inject according spring-beans into all your fields annotated with @Inject. In the test methods you can use these spring-beans and perform your actual tests. This pattern can be used for testing DAOs/Repositories, Use-Cases, or any other spring-bean with its entire configuration including database and transactions.

  • For Quarkus, you can similarly inject the CDI beans and perform tests. An example is shown below:

    @QuarkusTest
public class UcFindCountryTest {
  @Inject
  private UcFindCountry ucFindCountry;
  ...

When you are testing use-cases your authorization will also be in place. Therefore, you have to simulate a logon in advance what is done via the login method in the above Spring example. The test-infrastructure will automatically do a logout for you after each test method in doTearDown.

Level 3 Subsystem Test

A subsystem test runs against the external interfaces (e.g. HTTP service) of the integrated subsystem. Subsystem tests of the client subsystem are described in the devon4ng testing guide. In devon4j the server (JEE application) is the subsystem under test. The tests act as a client (e.g. service consumer) and the server has to be integrated and started in a container.

  • With devon4j and Spring you can write a subsystem-test as easy as illustrated in the following example:

    @SpringBootTest(classes = { MySpringBootApp.class }, webEnvironment = WebEnvironment.RANDOM_PORT)
public class CountryRestServiceTest extends SubsystemTest {

  @Inject
  private ServiceClientFactory serviceClientFactory;

  @Test
  public void testFindCountry() {

    // given
    String countryCode = "de";

    // when
    CountryRestService service = this.serviceClientFactory.create(CountryRestService.class);
    CountryEto country = service.findCountry(countryCode);

    // then
    assertThat(country).isNotNull();
    assertThat(country.getCountryCode()).isEqualTo(countryCode);
    assertThat(country.getName()).isEqualTo("Germany");
  }
}

    Even though not obvious on the first look this test will start your entire application as a server on a free random port (so that it works in CI with parallel builds for different branches) and tests the invocation of a (REST) service including (un)marshalling of data (e.g. as JSON) and transport via HTTP (all in the invocation of the findCountry method).

Do not confuse a subsystem test with a system integration test. A system integration test validates the interaction of several systems where we do not recommend test automation.

Level 4 System Test

A system test has the goal to test the system as a whole against its official interfaces such as its UI or batches. The system itself runs as a separate process in a way close to a regular deployment. Only external systems are simulated by test doubles.

The devonfw only gives advice for automated system test (TODO see allure testing framework). In nearly every project there must be manual system tests, too. This manual system tests are out of scope here.

Classifying Integration-Levels

For Spring stack, devon4j defines Category-Interfaces that shall be used as JUnit Categories. Also devon4j provides abstract base classes that you may extend in your test-cases if you like.

devon4j further pre-configures the maven build to only run integration levels 1-2 by default (e.g. for fast feedback in continuous integration). It offers the profiles subsystemtest (1-3) and systemtest (1-4). In your nightly build you can simply add -Psystemtest to run all tests.

Implementation

This section introduces how to implement tests on the different levels with the given devonfw infrastructure and the proposed frameworks. For Spring, see Spring Test Implementation

Regression testing

When it comes to complex output (even binary) that you want to regression test by comparing with an expected result, you sould consider Approval Tests using ApprovalTests.Java. If applied for the right problems, it can be very helpful.

Deployment Pipeline

A deployment pipeline is a semi-automated process that gets software-changes from version control into production. It contains several validation steps, e.g. automated tests of all integration levels. Because devon4j should fit to different project types - from agile to waterfall - it does not define a standard deployment pipeline. But we recommend to define such a deployment pipeline explicitly for each project and to find the right place in it for each type of test.

For that purpose, it is advisable to have fast running test suite that gives as much confidence as possible without needing too much time and too much infrastructure. This test suite should run in an early stage of your deployment pipeline. Maybe the developer should run it even before he/she checked in the code. Usually lower integration levels are more suitable for this test suite than higher integration levels.

Note, that the deployment pipeline always should contain manual validation steps, at least manual acceptance testing. There also may be manual validation steps that have to be executed for special changes only, e.g. usability testing. Management and execution processes of those manual validation steps are currently not in the scope of devonfw.

Test Coverage

We are using tools (SonarQube/Jacoco) to measure the coverage of the tests. Please always keep in mind that the only reliable message of a code coverage of X% is that (100-X)% of the code is entirely untested. It does not say anything about the quality of the tests or the software though it often relates to it.

Test Configuration

This section covers test configuration in general without focusing on integration levels as in the first chapter.

Configure Test Specific Beans

Sometimes it can become handy to provide other or differently configured bean implementations via CDI than those available in production. For example, when creating beans using @Bean-annotated methods they are usually configured within those methods. WebSecurityBeansConfig shows an example of such methods.

@Configuration
public class WebSecurityBeansConfig {
  //...
  @Bean
  public AccessControlSchemaProvider accessControlSchemaProvider() {
    // actually no additional configuration is shown here
    return new AccessControlSchemaProviderImpl();
  }
  //...
}

AccessControlSchemaProvider allows to programmatically access data defined in some XML file, e.g. access-control-schema.xml. Now, one can imagine that it would be helpful if AccessControlSchemaProvider would point to some other file than the default within a test class. That file could provide content that differs from the default. The question is: how can I change resource path of AccessControlSchemaProviderImpl within a test?

One very helpful solution is to use static inner classes. Static inner classes can contain @Bean -annotated methods, and by placing them in the classes parameter in @SpringBootTest(classes = { /* place class here*/ }) annotation the beans returned by these methods are placed in the application context during test execution. Combining this feature with inheritance allows to override methods defined in other configuration classes as shown in the following listing where TempWebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityBeansConfig. This relationship allows to override public AccessControlSchemaProvider accessControlSchemaProvider(). Here we are able to configure the instance of type AccessControlSchemaProviderImpl before returning it (and, of course, we could also have used a completely different implementation of the AccessControlSchemaProvider interface). By overriding the method the implementation of the super class is ignored, hence, only the new implementation is called at runtime. Other methods defined in WebSecurityBeansConfig which are not overridden by the subclass are still dispatched to WebSecurityBeansConfig.

//... Other testing related annotations
@SpringBootTest(classes = { TempWebSecurityConfig.class })
public class SomeTestClass {

  public static class TempWebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityBeansConfig {

    @Override
    @Bean
    public AccessControlSchemaProvider accessControlSchemaProvider() {

      ClassPathResource resource = new ClassPathResource(locationPrefix + "access-control-schema3.xml");
      AccessControlSchemaProviderImpl accessControlSchemaProvider = new AccessControlSchemaProviderImpl();
      accessControlSchemaProvider.setAccessControlSchema(resource);
      return accessControlSchemaProvider;
    }
  }
}

The following chapter of the Spring framework documentation explains issue, but uses a slightly different way to obtain the configuration.

Test Data

It is possible to obtain test data in two different ways depending on your test’s integration level.

Debugging Tests

The following two sections describe two debugging approaches for tests. Tests are either run from within the IDE or from the command line using Maven.

Debugging with the IDE

Debugging with the IDE is as easy as always. Even if you want to execute a SubsystemTest which needs a Spring context and a server infrastructure to run properly, you just set your breakpoints and click on Debug As → JUnit Test. The test infrastructure will take care of initializing the necessary infrastructure - if everything is configured properly.

Debugging with Maven

Please refer to the following two links to find a guide for debugging tests when running them from Maven.

In essence, you first have to start execute a test using the command line. Maven will halt just before the test execution and wait for your IDE to connect to the process. When receiving a connection the test will start and then pause at any breakpoint set in advance. The first link states that tests are started through the following command:

mvn -Dmaven.surefire.debug test

Although this is correct, it will run every test class in your project and - which is time consuming and mostly unnecessary - halt before each of these tests. To counter this problem you can simply execute a single test class through the following command (here we execute the TablemanagementRestServiceTest from the restaurant sample application):

mvn test -Dmaven.surefire.debug test -Dtest=TablemanagementRestServiceTest

It is important to notice that you first have to execute the Maven command in the according submodule, e.g. to execute the TablemanagementRestServiceTest you have first to navigate to the core module’s directory.