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

Summary


Mocking and spying techniques are used to isolate different parts of code or third-party libraries. They are essential if we are to proceed with great speed, not only while coding, but also while running tests. Tests without mocks are often too complex to write and can be so slow that, with time, TDD tends to become close to impossible. Slow tests mean that we won't be able to run all of them every time we write a new specification. That in itself leads to deterioration in the confidence we have in the our tests, since only a part of them is run.

Mocking is not only useful as a way to isolate external dependencies, but also as a way to isolate our own code from a unit we're working on.

In this chapter, we presented Mockito as, in our opinion, the framework with the best balance between functionality and ease of use. We invite you to investigate its documentation in more detail (http://mockito.org/), as well as other Java frameworks dedicated to mocking. EasyMock (http://easymock.org...