Software Construction

Unit Testing
Christoph Denzler / Martin Kropp
University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland
Institute for Mobile and Distributed Systems
Learning Target

You

understand and can explain the importance of
testing

can describe the basic concepts of the JUnit
testing tool

can use and configure JUnit

can organize and write simple tests

UnitTesting (Part1), FS2010 IMVS, Ch. Denzler/M. Kropp 2

Agenda

Introduction into Testing

Unit Testing

Testing with JUnit

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The Why, The What, The How

It has to do with quality!

Your software has to meet customer

requirements
 functional and non-functional requirements

How do you ensure that your software does

what it should?

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The Why, The What, The How

It has to do with safety!

You often have to change your existing code

because of new requirements, improvements,
and bug fixes

How do you ensure, that your changed software

still does what it did before?

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The Why, The What, The How

It has to do with sustainability!

You still have to fix bugs

How do you ensure, that a fixed bug never

shows up again? (or you notice it immediately,
at least)

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What is Testing?

Testing is the process of evaluating a particular

product to determine if it meets the customers
requirements.

That means
1. There must be well specified requirements to
test against (expected results)
2. Testing is comparing actual results to expected
results

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What is Testing?

The deviation of an actual result from an

expected result, is called a defect

Testing can only show the presence of a defect
but not the absence of defects

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The First „Bug“

Grace Hopper’s “bug” (moth stuck in a relay on

an early machine)

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Some Famous Software Failures

1991: The Patriot Missile failure, in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, on February 25, 1991
which resulted in 28 deaths, is ultimately attributable to poor handling of rounding
errors.

1991: The sinking of the Sleipner A offshore platform in Gandsfjorden near
Stavanger, Norway, on August 23, 1991, resulted in a loss of nearly one billion
dollars. It was found to be the result of inaccurate finite element analysis.

1996: The explosion of the Ariane 5 rocket just after lift-off on its maiden voyage
off French Guiana, on June 4, 1996, was ultimately the consequence of a simple
overflow.

1999: NASA’s Mars lander, September 1999, crashed due to a units integration
fault—over $50 million US !

2005: Arbeitslosengeld II = ALG-II in Germany:writing 9 digit bank codes left-
aligned in 10 digit fields leads to adding a zero at the end and wrong bank codes.

2010: Year 2010 bug on German bankcards (Jan 4 2010): It showed up to be a
software defect due to incorrect year handling.

More on http://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/bugse.html

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The Why, The What, The How

You have to show that

The product works as expected

But also its individual parts, like
 services
 components

 classes

 methods

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The Why, The What, The How

You can do this manually

 Writing test specifications and protocols

Or (much better) automated
 Let the system do it for you (at least part of it)

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Testing Dimensions
Level

system

integration

component

unit

Accessibility
stress
white box black box
performance

reliability
usability
robustness
functionality

Target
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The Testing Process

Test Test
Test case Test data
results report

Design test Prepare test Run Compare test

cases data tests results to test data

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Unit Testing

Unit Testing is done

 on each module
 in isolation

 to verify the unit’s behavior

Unit test will

 establish some kind of artificial environment
 invoke routines in the module under test

 check the results against expected values

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Using Test Frameworks

Provides following capabilities

 test specification
 test implementation
 standard way to specify setup and cleanup
 method for selecting individual tests or all available
tests
 means of analyzing output for expected (or
unexpected) results
 standardized form of failure reporting

=> Use JUnit for Java Unit Testing

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JUnit 4 Example
package unittesting;
import java.util.NoSuchElementException;

public class IntArray {

private int[] array;

public IntArray(int[] values) { array = values; }

public int findLargest() throws NoSuchElementException {

int max = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
if (array.length == 0) { throw new NoSuchElementException(); }
for (int num : array) {
if (num > max) {
max = num;
}
}
return max;
}
}

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JUnit4

 Uses annotations, static import…

 Setup, Cleanup
 @Before, @After
 @BeforeClass, @AfterClass
 Testing
 @Test
 @Test(expected=MovieMgmtException.class)
 @Ignore
 Checking
 Assert (use "static import")

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Using JUnit Asserts

Use Asserts by
 using the prefixed syntax
Assert.assertEquals()
 importing statically the Assert class
import static org.unit.Assert.assertEquals

There are several assertions
 assertEquals()
assertEquals([String message], expected, actual)
assertEquals([String message], expected, actual,
tolerance)
 assertNull(), assertNotNull(), assertSame(), assertNotSame(),
assertTrue(), assertFalse(), fail()

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Organizing Your Test

Separate tests from production code

myProject/trunk
/src/prod
/src/test // as under prod
/src/test/data // for test data
/log // takes all output

Put it into the same packages

myProject/trunk
/src/prod/ch.fhnw.edu.rental.model
/src/test/ch.fhnw.edu.rental.model

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Reflections on Unit Testing

Coding with Confidence

What is Unit Testing?

Why should I bother with Unit Testing?

What do I want to accomplish?
 Does it do what I want?
 Does it do what I want all the time?
 Can I depend on it?
 Does it document my intent?

How do I do Unit Testing?

Bad Excuses for not Unit Testing
 It takes too much time to write the tests
 It takes too long to run the tests
 It's not my job to test my code
 I don't really know how the code is supposed to behave so I can't test it
 But it compiles
 I'm being paid to write code, not to write tests
 I feel guilty about putting testers and QA staff out of work
 My company won't let me run unit tests on the live system

from "Pragmatic Unit Testing"

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And Finally …

Some pragmatic tips

Test Early. Test Often. Test Automatically.

Tip 62 (The Pragmatic Programmer)

Coding Ain't Done 'Til All the Tests Run.

Tip 63 (The Pragmatic Programmer)

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