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

Hamcrest and AssertJ


In the previous section, we gave an overview of what a unit test is and how it can be written using two of the most commonly used Java frameworks. Since tests are an important part of our projects, why not improve the way we write them? Some cool projects emerged, aiming to empower the semantics of tests by changing the way that assertions are made. As a result, tests are more concise and easier to understand.

Hamcrest

Hamcrest adds a lot of methods called matchers. Each matcher is designed to perform a comparison operation. It is extensible enough to support custom matchers created by yourself. Furthermore, JUnit supports Hamcrest natively since its core is included in the JUnit distribution. You can start using Hamcrest effortlessly. However, we want to use the full-featured project so we will add a test dependency to Gradle's file:

testCompile 'org.hamcrest:hamcrest-all:1.3' 

Let us compare one assert from JUnit with the equivalent one from Hamcrest:

  • The JUnit assert:
List...