Interview and Book Excerpt: Hani Suleiman & Cedric Beust on TestNG

Posted by Scott Delap on Feb 14, 2008

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Architecture & Design

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Unit Testing

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TestNG

InfoQ.com recently sat down with Hani Suleiman and Cédric Beust the authors of Next Generation Java Testing: TestNG and Advanced Concepts to discuss the book and their thoughts about testing in general. InfoQ is also pleased to offer an excerpt from chapter 2 of the book, "Mocks and Stubs".

Cedric:

TestNG started as an experimental toy project. The main motivation was that despite using JUnit for years, there were still a lot of concepts and approaches used by JUnit that I didn't feel comfortable with. The more I investigated, and the more I disagreed with some of its core philosophical design decisions, such as reinstantiating your class before each method invocation (thus forcing me to use statics if I want to maintain state between invocations) or not allowing me to create dependent tests, which are crucial for functional testing.

Overall, I just found that JUnit was doing great in the area of unit testing but was lacking in other places required by any kind of functional or acceptance testing.

Back then, I was also involved in the annotations JSR and it occurred to me that annotations would be a good fit to mark test methods.

Finally, the last piece in the puzzle came from a web site with the strange name of del.icio.us that introduced this bizarre new concept of "tags". It occurred to me that it would be neat if I could tag my test methods and then be able to invoke any arbitrary group of them without having to recompile anything. I renamed these tags "groups" and I realized that they would be a great match for annotations as well.

With these ideas in mind, I set out to create TestNG 1.0 almost four years ago and I published it just for fun and to get some feedback.

Read more of InfoQ's interview with Cedrick Beust and Hani Suleiman

1. Back to top

   Free facials?

   by Michael Neale

   For the first 100 copies sold? (sorry, couldn't resist).

   Reply

2. Back to top

   Mocks and Stubs

   by Pierre-Antoine Grégoire

   If you need to create Random Value Objects on the fly for your tests, consider Usurper www.org-libs.org/org-lib-usurper/ (Shameless self-publicity).
   
   This allows to generate a random User (for example) Value Object like this:
   

   
   UsurperGenerator<User> userGenerator = new UsurperGenerator<User>(User.class);
   //GENERATE ONE INSTANCE
   User user = userGenerator.generateUsurper();
   //GENERATE A LIST OF INSTANCES
   List<User> userList = userGenerator.generateUsurperList(3);
   

   
   
   There are many other features, like automatic stubbing of DAO methods. Check it out!

   Reply

3. Back to top

   free chapter

   by serge boulay

   I just read the free chapter, liked it so much that I decided to buy the book.
   
   Thanks

   Reply

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