Looking for testable design in described case - unit-testing

Question

I have a system, which gets lists of objects from external system in some ABC-format, converts it to internal representation and passes to external service:
class ABCService() {
public ABCService(ExtService extService) {
this.extService = extService;
}
public void do(ABCData [] abcObjs) throws NoDataException {
if (abcObjs.length == 0) {
throw NoDataException();
} else {
List<Data> objs = new ArrayList<>();
for (ABCData abcObj : abcObjs) {
Data obj = Parser.parse(abcObj); // static call
objs.add(obj);
}
extService.do(objs);
}
}
}
When it comes to testing ABCService, we can test two things:
If no data is passed to "do", service throws an exception;
If some data is passed to "do", service should call extService and pass exactly the same number of objects, it has received from test caller.
But, though Parser factory is also tested, there is no guarantee, that output "objs" array is somehow connected to input abcObjs (e.g. method has created list with the predefined length, but method "forgets" to populate the list).
I my opinion those two test cases don't fully cover method's workflow leaving some of it dangerously untested.
How to modify ABCService design to increase it's testability?

Answer 1

The major testing difficulty in this code is that you have two collaborators and one of them is static.
If you can convert your Parser to a non-static (or perhaps wrap it in a non-static) and inject that as you do the extService, you could test that the parser is called the right number of times with the right arguments. Stubbing in the return values from the parser, you could also verify that your extService is called with the appropriately transformed objects instead of just the correct number of objects.

Answer 2

The problem you encountered is trying to handle two tasks in one function. The function do can be logically separated into two different member functions, so that you can use unittest for each of them.
By using refactoring, you can extract out the parsing and populating logic into another member function.
class ABCService() {
public void do(ABCData [] abcObjs) throws NoDataException {
extService.do(populateList(abcObjs));
}
List<Data> popuateList(ABCData[] abcObjs) {
if (abcObjs.length == 0) {
throw NoDataException();
} else {
List<Data> objs = new ArrayList<>();
for (ABCData abcObj : abcObjs) {
Data obj = Parser.parse(abcObj); // static call
objs.add(obj);
return objs;
}
}
}
while your current unittest can still remain for the "do" function, and additionally, you can add a unittest case for "populateList" function to ensure it generate correct data list