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

Posted by Scott Delap on Feb 14, 2008 03:44 PM

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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

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   Free facials?

   Feb 14, 2008 8:10 PM by Michael Neale

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

   Reply

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   Mocks and Stubs

   Feb 15, 2008 3:33 AM by Pierre-Antoine Grégoire

   If you need to create Random Value Objects on the fly for your tests, consider Usurper http://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

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   free chapter

   Feb 15, 2008 4:43 PM 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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