Integration Testing

The first thing that we have to do before we can start writing integration tests for our data access code is to decide how we will configure our test cases. We have two options: the right one and wrong one. Unfortunately many developers make the wrong choice. How can we avoid making the same mistake? […] Read More

A few years ago I was one of those developers who write unit tests for my data access code. I was testing everything in isolation, and I was pretty pleased with myself. I honestly thought that I was doing a good job. Oh boy was I wrong! This blog post describes why we shouldn’t write […] Read More

A good unit test should fail for only one reason. This means that a proper unit test tests only one logical concept. If we want to write clean tests, we have to identify those logical concepts, and write only one test case per logical concept. This blog post describes how we can identify the logical […] Read More

Automated tests are worthless if they don’t assert anything, but the problem of regular JUnit assertions is that they speak the wrong language and become messy if we have to write a lot of them. If we want to write tests which are both easy understand and maintain, we have to figure out a better […] Read More

Creating new objects is an essential part of automated testing, and the most obvious way to do it is to use the new keyword. However, this is not the best way to create new objects in our test cases, and using the new keyword will make our tests harder to read and maintain. This blog […] Read More

Magic is the arch enemy of readable code, and one of the most common form of magic which can be found from our code is a magic number. Magic numbers litters our source code, and transforms it into a pile of unreadable and unmaintainable rubbish. That is why we should avoid magic numbers at all […] Read More