Book Image

Test-Driven Java Development, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Viktor Farcic, Alex Garcia
Book Image

Test-Driven Java Development, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Viktor Farcic, Alex Garcia

Overview of this book

Test-driven development (TDD) is a development approach that relies on a test-first procedure that emphasizes writing a test before writing the necessary code, and then refactoring the code to optimize it.The value of performing TDD with Java, one of the longest established programming languages, is to improve the productivity of programmers and the maintainability and performance of code, and develop a deeper understanding of the language and how to employ it effectively. Starting with the basics of TDD and understanding why its adoption is beneficial, this book will take you from the first steps of TDD with Java until you are confident enough to embrace the practice in your day-to-day routine.You'll be guided through setting up tools, frameworks, and the environment you need, and we will dive right into hands-on exercises with the goal of mastering one practice, tool, or framework at a time. You'll learn about the Red-Green-Refactor procedure, how to write unit tests, and how to use them as executable documentation.With this book, you'll also discover how to design simple and easily maintainable code, work with mocks, utilize behavior-driven development, refactor old legacy code, and release a half-finished feature to production with feature toggles.You will finish this book with a deep understanding of the test-driven development methodology and the confidence to apply it to application programming with Java.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
9
Refactoring Legacy Code – Making It Young Again
Index

Chapter 1. Why Should I Care for Test-Driven Development?

This book is written by developers for developers. As such, most of the learning will be through code. Each chapter will present one or more test-driven development (TDD) practices and we'll try to master them by solving katas. In karate, a kata is an exercise where you repeat a form many times, making little improvements in each. Following the same philosophy, we'll be making small, but significant improvements from one chapter to the next. You'll learn how to design and code better, reduce time to market (TTM), produce always up-to-date documentation, obtain high code coverage through quality tests, and write clean code that works.

Every journey has a start and this one is no exception. Our destination is a Java developer with the TDD black belt.

In order to know where we're going, we'll have to discuss, and find answers, to some questions that will define our voyage. What is TDD? Is it a testing technique, or something else? What are the benefits of applying TDD?

The goal of this chapter is to obtain an overview of TDD, to understand what it is, and to grasp the benefits it provides for its practitioners.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Understanding TDD
  • What is TDD?
  • Testing
  • Mocking
  • Executable documentation
  • No debugging