Aparna Chaudhary' Blog

Writing clean, isolated and efficient unit test is often a challenge for developers. Efficient test should cover all the possible business scenarios. To create test for covering multiple test scenarios, you need more test data.

For instance, imagine you are writing a test for some Service component. Now if the responsibility of this service is to just collect some data from DAO Layer and pass it on to Business Delegate, life is easy. You can create a mock for DAO using frameworks like EasyMock and you are done. But that’s not often the case. For testing services with complex business logic, its not sufficient to return dummy data. In this case, we create the expected test data and mock the DAO to return the expected data. If this input seed is a simple object, its few additional lines of code and we are done. But what if the test is dealing with complex data model? Normal practice that I observed amongst developers is some private methods are created deep down the test to generate test data – generateXXX().

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Today I created my first unit tests for Flex code using FlexUnit. Later I integrated the tests with the maven build using Flex Mojos. Flex-Mojos is a collection of maven-plugins created to work with Flex.

We have to use the Flex Compiler Plugin. This plugin is basically used to compile the source files and run tests. This plugin has 5 goals which are bound to different maven lifecycles. I chose to explicitly specify goals that I want maven to run. Maven has a default value for testSourceDirectory as src/test/java. For using Flex mojos, we have to specify testSourceDirectory as src/test/flex. Make sure all your tests are created under this directory.

	<build>
		<sourceDirectory>src/main/flex</sourceDirectory>
		<testSourceDirectory>src/test/flex</testSourceDirectory>
	        <plugins>
		    <plugin>
			<groupId>info.flex-mojos</groupId>
			<artifactId>flex-compiler-mojo</artifactId>
			<version>${flex-mojos.version}</version>
			<extensions>true</extensions>
			<executions>
			    <execution>
				<goals>
				    <goal>compile-swf</goal>
				    <goal>test-compile</goal>
				    <goal>test-run</goal>
				</goals>
			    </execution>
			</executions>
			<configuration>
			    <locales>
				<param>en_US</param>
			    </locales>
			    <contextRoot>/</contextRoot>
			</configuration>
		    </plugin>
  		</plugins>
	</build>

Next thing is to add Flex Unit dependency in the dependency section.

	<dependencies>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>flexunit</groupId>
			<artifactId>flexunit</artifactId>
			<version>0.85</version>
			<type>swc</type>
			<scope>test</scope>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>flexunit.junit</groupId>
			<artifactId>flexunit-optional</artifactId>
			<version>0.85</version>
			<type>swc</type>
			<scope>test</scope>
		</dependency>
	</dependencies>

You would also need flash player installed on the build server. In case if you end up with OutOfMemory error, increase the heap size using MAVEN_OPTS in mvn.bat file.

SET MAVEN_OPTS=-Xmx128m

If you need more help, you can always refer the FlexUnit Example.

In one of my projects I did some work on process improvements. The main target was to set up independent developer workstation. We stubbed out all the interfaces. Earlier we tried to share a development database in a group of 4-5 developers. But believe me, I’ve seen developers throwing coffee cups when someone touches their data. Imagine you spending couple of precious hours out of your day on analysing the data and then getting it in right state to run your test cases and the moment before you hit “Run”, someone drops in and mess up all your data. How insane!!

Well the answer is simple, give me my own database and save yourself from the typical excuses. I evaluated couple of open source databases like MySQL, Postgres, EnterpriseDB and finally settled on OracleXE. Well we use Oracle in production and hence its easy to setup development environment with OracleXE with almost no extra tweaks in the scripts. I used DBUnit for testing database modules. It works quite well, but I think my strategy to setup test data was not optimum. It takes bit longer to run the tests now. I used Dumbster as a fake SMTP server and XStream for creating enriched objects for my tests.

Also one useful tool I would like to share here is DBMonster. It really helped me for generating mass random test data. Now I don’t have to request the DBA’ to give me test data. Well its not that simple also, as you need to understand the states of the dataset to create the seed xml files. But I think its still better than having human dependencies.

Happy Development !!