I have been doing a lot a reading about unit testing.
Unit testing seems all well and good.
But it seems to miss a lot of the fundamentals of how the web works. User Interaction.
I have not seen any way a unit test could test for unexpected input, or test to make sure that an ajax call works etc.
Am I missing something here or is unit testing not really designed well for web development?
You are not missing anything.
Ideally unit testing is about testing a small piece of code, e.g. a class in isolation. For this you may want to use a unit testing tools such as JUnit or NUnit. Some people refer to this type of tests as developer tests.
In contrast to that you may want to test web applications as a whole. Some call this acceptance testing. For the latter you could use a tool such as Selenium. Tools like Selenium can test Ajax and other JavaScript as well.
You have even more options if you take a look at a tool like WebDriver as you will find that you can implement Selenium-based tests using a unit testing tool.
Take a look at Selenium.
Related
How do you write unit tests for Htmx?
Stack overflow isn't letting me post such a short question, so this paragraph says that I didn't see docs or a library about this.
EDIT: Specifically, I wish to unit test in Django.
There are a couple of solutions to this:
Many server side platforms offer the equivalent of rails "functional" controller tests, and those can be used to test your partial end points, depending on what platform you are using.
You can write client side javascript tests in the normal manner. The htmx test suite uses chai.js & mocha.js to create a test suite, and sinon.js to mock out the server side. If you can run the tests against your actual server, that will simplify things even more.
Broadly, for day to day unit tests, I would lean towards the first approach because it will be more stable and "functional" and then use the second approach for integration testing.
I guess you use some kind of framework. For example Django, Laravel, Ruby on Rails, ...
Just use the tools of your framework to test your http endpoints.
For e2e tests I would use Playwright. But keep in mind this rule: 80% unittests, 15% integration tests, 5% e2e tests.
I have one e2e test which checks to happy path.
And a lot of pytest-django based tests.
For forms I use this pattern: html_form_to_dict
Maybe this question gets better answers in the discord channel, since there is no clear answer.
I read a lot about unit testing and integration testing, and the unit testing part I understand fairly well - isolate the object under test, and mock out dependencies using interfaces and inject those. (Or use seams to inject testable behavior).
However something that is still a mystery to me even after searching is integration testing. Every blog and link talks about testing various components together, do's and dont's, CI Servers, etc, but there's not much explanation in the way of how this is to be done.
Is an integration test automated? Or is this a manual effort? If it is automated, do I write this as code in the native language my app is in? How do I check or verify if the integration test is working as expected?
For example, if I have 4 services (a Socket Client, a Socket Server, a Database, and a Web Application) and I want to do some integration testing on how these 4 services interact with each other. How exactly how would I approach this? I know that some dummy data will be involved, but which part of my integration test is checking if the systems are working together correctly? This part is really unclear to me.
As you said about unit testing, you need to isolate the object under test, and mock out dependencies using interfaces and inject those...
Integration test is without isolating the unit... You can test two part or more (but you shouldn't have extensive integration test suits neither big test scenario). An example of integration test is testing your code with the database, you could need for that to initiate the database and clean it to have a repeatable tests.
You could have as well interface test (client execution and integration with the server for example) and so on.
Don't forget that this tests come with a downside, they are slower and harder to maintain, but they have different purpose than unit test, which is checking that units works as expected with real dependencies.
So to wrap-up if you write a test without totally isolating the unit it is an integration test, due to its nature it's better to test the logic of your code by unit test and reserve fewer integration tests when needed to test the interaction between the units.
You can also check this nice introduction https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/48237/what-is-an-integration-test-exactly
An interesting definition from "the pragmatic programmer": integration tests show that the major parts of a system work well together
I am pretty confuse with unit and integration testing of traditional software development and web development. I have seen many different answer and explanation of it.
The Web Engineering textbook says about unit and integration testing for web application:
Unit testing: Testing on single web page as opposed to testing single function
Integration testing: Testing on flow of data from one web page to another (and linkage)
while the software engineering textbook defines unit testing and integration testing as followed.
unit testing: Testing on smallest unit
integration testing: Testing on interaction between unit or module
Hope someone can clarify to me which is the correct one.
The "web engineering" textbook is... likely wrong. That's not what those words mean to most folks.
Unit testing: testing the smallest possible bits of functionality, independently. For Java, something like the JUnit framework is used to do this. You often try to test just one class, and you may fake it's dependencies using something like Mockito, so you're really testing just one thing.
Integration Testing: testing several parts of the system together. This may be a small integration test (testing multiple classes without mocking), or something large, like making sure that your webserver is connecting to a database correctly.
End-to-End Testing: the biggest Integration test; this is basically standing up every part of your system and running scripts that look like fake users. Selenium is a tool used for this.
I am new to testing in general and am working on a Grails application.
I want to write a test that says "when this action is called, the correct view is returned". I don't know how to go about deciding if I should make something like this a unit test or an integration test. Either test would show me what I want - how do I decide?
One problem with integration tests is their speed. For me, integration tests take 15+ seconds to start up. In that time, certain things do slip out of mind focus.
I prefer to go with unit tests that start in no more then 2 sec and can be run several times in those 15 seconds. Especially with mockDomain(). Especially with Grails 2.0 implementing criteria and named queries in unit tests.
One more argument for unit tests is they force you to decouple your code. Integration tests always tempt you to just rely on some other component existing and initialized.
From Grails Docs section 9.1
Unit testing are tests at the "unit" level. In other words you are
testing individual methods or blocks of code without considering for
surrounding infrastructure. In Grails you need to be particularity
aware of the difference between unit and integration tests because in
unit tests Grails does not inject any of the dynamic methods present
during integration tests and at runtime.
From Grails Docs section 9.2
Integration tests differ from unit tests in that you have full access
to the Grails environment within the test. Grails will use an
in-memory HSQLDB database for integration tests and clear out all the
data from the database in between each test.
What this means is that a unit test is completely isolated from the Grails environment whereas an integration test is not. According to Scott Davis, author of this article, it is acceptable to write only integration tests...
Unit vs. integration tests
As I mentioned earlier, Grails supports two basic types of tests: unit
and integration. There's no syntactical difference between the two —
both are written as a GroovyTestCase using the same assertions. The
difference is the semantics. A unit test is meant to test the class in
isolation, whereas the integration test allows you to test the class
in a full, running environment.
Quite frankly, if you want to write all of your Grails tests as
integration tests, that's just fine with me. All of the Grails
create-* commands generate corresponding integration tests, so most
folks simply use what is already there. As you'll see in just a
moment, most of the things you want to test require the full
environment to be up and running anyway, so integration tests are a
pretty good default. If you have noncore Grails classes that you'd
like to test, unit tests are perfectly fine.
First go through this chapter of the grails guide http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/9.%20Testing.html
It talks about testing controllers and ability to get controller response like so :
controller.response.contentAsString
Now deciding on which test is more of an art rather than science. I prefer unit tests cause they are faster to run :)
Its a really interesting and challenging question to answer, but the truth is it really depends on what exactly you are testing.
Take the following test: "saving a book to the database". The hints are in the description. We are saying we need a book and we need a database, so in this case a unit test wont do because we need the integrated database.
My advice is write the full test description down and break it down like I did above. It will give you the hints to help you decide.
This is made easier with spock where you can use strings for test names.
We are starting to build infrastructure components in JSF2.0.
What is the best approach for unit testing them?
I tried JSFUnit in the past but wasn't satisfied with it. Is there an easier way to implement it?
This may be more integration testing than unit testing, but if you want to see how your components work in an actual browser, the selenium project has some nice features, and you can do it all through unit tests. You can look it over here: http://seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.html. I've found that between regular unit tests, unit tests using jmockit or the like, and selenium, I can cover pretty much everything when testing my components.
Cheers,
Bill