The question is more about the fundamental understanding of a normal/ideal CI flow and understanding the scope of integration testing in it.
As per my understanding, the basic CI CD flow is
UnitTesting --> IntegrationTesting --> Build Artifact --> Deploy to Dev/Sandbox or any other subsequent environments.
So unit tetsing and integration testing collectively decide/make sure if the build is stable and ready to be deployed.
But, recently, we had this discussion in my team where we wanted to run integration tests on deployed instances on Dev/Sandbox etc , so as to verify if the application is working fine after deployment.
And the microsoft's article on Build - Deploy - Test workflows suggests that this could be a possible way.
So , my questions are :-
Are integration tests supposed to test configuration of different environments ?
Are integration tests supposed to be run before packaging application or deploying the application ?
If at all, some automated testing is required to test deployed application functioning on all environments ?
If not integration tests then what could be alternative solutions
You're mixing Integration testing with System testing.
Integration testing checks that some components can work together (can be integrated). You may have integration tests to verify how does the Data layer API operates with a database; or how does the the Web API responds to HTTP calls. You might not have the entire system completely working in order to do integration testing of its components.
Unlike integration tests, the System tests require all the components to be implemented and configured. That is end-to-end testing (e.g. from a web request to a database record). This kind of testing requires the entire system to be deployed which makes them more 'real' but expensive.
Related
Within a short-time period I'm going to start a project based on Windows Azure. And I was wondering what are the experiences with testing for Windows Azure projects (in continuous intergration (with a TFS build server))? (Eventual using TDD)
Some things I was wondering:
Do you use mocking (in your own written wrapper class)?
Do you use the storage emulator?
Do you deploy the services to Azure and run the tests from the build server to the cloud? (what about costs)?
Thnaks in advance!
The same good practices for writing unit tests for applications outside of Windows Azure apply. If you have an external dependency to what you are actually testing, that dependency should be mocked and injected for your granular unit test.
For example, when I'm using Windows Azure Storage Queues I will have an interface that I use to interact with the queue itself, so in my code consuming the queue service I can mock the subsystem using the interface and use dependency injection to inject the mock. This removes the necessity to actually deal with the emulator during unit tests. For the most part the actual concrete implementation of the code working with the queue is not much more than a very thin wrapper.
I personally don't shoot for 100% test coverage, so I may not have direct unit tests that utilize the concrete implementation of the wrappers. In many cases I try to have integration tests that will exercise these wrappers and exercise multiple aspects of the system working together. In some cases I can run the integration tests in the emulator (for Storage operations for example), but in some cases they simply have to be run with access to the Windows Azure environment (in the case of usage of ACS or Service Bus).
Ideally you'd like to have a set of scripts that can be run to spin up a minimum set of test servers in Azure, deploy your solution and exercise the integration tests that can't be done on premises. Then get the results of that and have the script shut everything down (or optionally leave it running if you need that). Then run the integration tests suite that utilizes these scripts often enough to detect issues, but you certainly don't need to run them every time you check something in unless you are happy with running the test environment all the time. If you okay with the cost of a semi-permanent test environment running in Azure then just make sure to have the scripts to an update deployment rather than a delete and redeploy to cut down on cost a bit (savings would be relative to how often the deploy occurs).
I believe this question is a very subjective one as you're likely to get several different opinions.
Java EE is a new world for me, my experiences are on embedded systems, but I started a new job and I would like to know if there is a test process to follow for web applications based on Java EE. Which test strategy is usually adopted in this field?
Basic Unit test
Functional test
Integration test
System test, stress test, load test,....
....
and which is the scope of each test phase for web development? As server code and client code are both involved I don't know which is the best approach in this field. Also, several machines are involved: DB, buisness tier, presentation tier, load balancers, authentication with CAS, Active Directory,...
Which is the best test environment for each phases? When using the production CAS authentication, ...
Links, books, simple explanation or other kind of address is well appreciated.
The best test framework is Junit -for unit tests, in my opinion.
http://www.junit.org/
-for mocking objects, which you will need a lot, like to mock the database, mock services and other object in j2ee environment to be able to test in isolation .use http://www.jmock.org/ , http://code.google.com/p/mockito/, http://www.easymock.org/
-for acceptance and functional testing there is selenium http://seleniumhq.org/ this framework enables you to automate your tests.
I Advice you to read this books about testing in general and testing in j2ee evironment in particular.
http://www.manning.com/rainsberger/
http://www.amazon.com/Test-Driven-Development-By-Example/dp/0321146530
http://manning.com/massol/
http://manning.com/koskela/
First, whatever you plan to do as testing, take care of your build process (a good starting point is maven as build tool)
Junit (or testng) is almost good for everything (due to its simplicity)
Unit test:
For mock, I would prefer Mockito to jmock or easymock.
Acceptance test:
Regarding UI testing selenium is fine for web application (give a look at PageObject pattern if you plan to do a lot of UI testing).
For other interface testing (such as webservice), soapui is a nice starting point.
Integration testing:
You will face the middle ware problem, mainly solved in java by a container. Now it becomes fun :) If you run in "real" JEE, then it depends if it's prior to JEE6 or not as from JEE6 you have an embedded container (which really ease the testing). Otherwise, go for a dependency injection framework (Spring, Guice, ...).
Other hints for integration or acceptance testing:
you will may be need to mock some interface (give a look to MOCO to mock external service based on HTTP).
also think about some embedded servlet container (Jetty) to ease web the testing.
configuration and provisioning can be a problem too. ex.: for the DB you can automate this with "flyway" or "liquibase"
DB testing you have two approach: resetting data after each test (see DBUnit) or in transaction testing (see Spring test for an example)
I have developed a JSP servlet based web application and I would like to perform some functional testing on it.I know that functional test is to make sure that the application is performing actions which it is supposed to perform.
I have googled and found out that Selenium can be used for automated functional testing.I saw that I can record my actions which can be replayed to me.
Now since I am new to testing applications, I dont understand how replaying the actions is useful in testing.
I have not performed any unit tests on my application,i mean formally using jUnit and stuff, although I used to just run parts of my code to check if it was working properly.Is that a bad thing as in not using formal unit testing frameworks.
Replaying is only useful to verify if the test is doing everything the tester intended. The key point is that Selenium can export the testcase you're seeing replaying to a fullworthy testcase class for among others JUnit. This class can then be added to the group of other testcases you have for the webapp. This can then be executed after automatic build as part of continuous integration.
For basic functional testing, the Selenium IDE, in addition to record/playback capabilities, provides assertions and verifications for elements in your web app. Establishing these strategically (around perceived problem areas) will enable you to regress through your application ensuring newer implementations do not break existing functionality.
I have written a REST server (in Java using RestEasy) with a unit test suite written in Scala. The test suite uses the mock server provided by RestEasy and runs with every Maven build.
I would like to create a second functional test suite that calls an actual tomcat server and exercises each REST service. I do not want this new suite to run with every build, but only on demand, perhaps controlled with a command line argument to Maven.
Is it possible to create multiple independent test suites in a Maven project and disable some from automatic running, or do I need to create a separate Maven project for this functional suite? How can I segregate the different functional suite code if these tests are in the same project with the unit tests (different directories)? How do I run a selected suite with command line arguments?
I never used it myself but I am aware of maven integration tests run by the Maven Failsafe plugin.
As the surefire plugin by default includes the tests named **/Test*.java, **/*Test.java, **/*TestCase.java the failsafe plugin runs the **/IT*.java, **/*IT.java, **/*ITCase.java tests.
Both test approaches have different intentions which seems to match part of your needs. It might be worth to have a look.....
Another approach would be to use maven profiles and specifiy different surefire includes for each profile.
In a J2EE web application, how do people manage resources so that they are visible to both the web context and to unit/integration tests?
I find that often you end up having your source/resource folders configured a certain way during development (i.e., what Maven expects) and so your unit tests will run in your IDE. But once the web app is built and packaged into a WAR file (i.e., when your Continuous Integration server has done a build) your unit tests won't run anymore because the resources are located elsewhere.
Do you end up keeping resources in two different places and manually keeping them in sync?
We tried using unit tests in the container but gave up on it years ago. It's much better (for us at least) to make each unit test cover a single class and nothing else, mocking out the dependencies on other classes (see JMock or its many competitors). A good basic rule is that if it touches the database, network, or the filesystem, it isn't a unit test. (It may be useful for something else, but it isn't a unit test. See these unit testing rules for more on this.)
Unit tests written this way can be run anywhere, and they are blazingly fast (we have thousands and run them in under 60 seconds on medium-spec hardware.)
You may also want to run integration tests that check a subsystem or the whole application. We find that subsystem tests can also use mocking at their borders - for instance, we fake an external pricing feed - and that end-to-end tests work best with tools like Selenium or WebDriver, which let you deploy the whole application on a server and then hit it with a browser just like users do.
(By the way, our method of unit testing makes us mockists, rather than classicists, in Martin Fowler's taxonomy.)
Normally this is the reason for multi-module builds. The external services are in a separate build unit than the web application. So you build, package and run your integrations tests when you build that module.
Another module can contain your domain model and its unit tests, which are also run at build time.
It is quite common for a module that results in a WAR to not have any java code in it at all, but only web related artifacts. Although not necessary, this is often done because code that is in a war module cannot be included into another module.
The last special case is the module containing web-tests. This module may often need test-scoped artifacts from the other modules (because it is testing the application from the outside, but may need data from the inside). This can be solves by also packaging test-resources in jar files, creating a separate set of "test" jar files for each modules.
Multi module builds are the norm for maven projects, and are also easy to set up for other build systems like ant.
I won't package testing resources nor tests in a WAR file neither run unit tests from the WAR. Why you are trying to do so?