Want to improve your automation testing skills? This article will introduce 10 excellent Java testing frameworks and libraries to improve your automation testing skills.
Here's the translation: Recently, I've written a lot of articles for Java developers, introducing some programming languages, libraries, and frameworks that developers should learn. In the face of multiple technical abilities, if your energy is only enough to improve one of them, then I think automated testing skills are the most worthy of you to improve. Testing is an important discipline that distinguishes professional developers from amateur developers. It's not that you master TDD, BDD, or some other testing method, but at the most basic level, whether you can write test code for automated testing. Many Java developers write unit and integration test code that runs automatically at build time. Developers mainly use some continuous integration tools to write test code, such as Jenkins or TeamCity. Do you have any doubts about this: Why should programmers care about automated testing? In fact, with the advent and popularity of DevOps, the importance of automated testing is growing exponentially. Companies generally prefer programmers who are good at writing unit tests, and even better if the programmers are also familiar with various unit testing frameworks, libraries, and tools. Such as JUnit, Selenium, REST-Assured, Spock framework, etc. As Java developers, we need to do a variety of very different jobs. For example, write core Java code, create JSP pages, write REST APIs, and even write Groovy scripts for automated builds. We also need to understand different tools for automated testing. For example, I only knew JUnit for a long time. Later I had to test the JSP page, and it suddenly dawned on me when I learned about Selenium. Same goes for REST Assured, I usually use curl directives to test my REST APIs, it takes unit testing of REST APIs to a new level.
I think a good programmer needs to learn to use and utilize tools, so I often use my free time to learn and explore various new tools and libraries, this article will show some of the tools I know well.
In this article, I will share 10 of the best tools, frameworks and libraries to help Java developers perform better unit and integration testing in different Java projects.
JUnit JUnit should need no introduction. Even if you are a Java beginner, I think you should have heard of it, it allows you to write unit tests for Java code. Almost all commonly used IDEs, such as Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ, can integrate JUnit, which means that developers can write and run unit tests directly in these IDEs. Most people are still using JUnit 4, in fact the new JUnit 5 has been released. You can use JUnit for unit testing and integration testing, plus it supports Java 8 features.
REST Assured is more difficult to test and validate REST services in Java than dynamic languages like Groovy. REST Assured brings the simplicity of these languages to Java. This is a great tool for REST API integration testing.
Selenium Selenium is probably the most popular Java UI testing tool, with it, you don't need to launch a JSP page in a browser to test it. You can use JUnit and Selenium to test web application UI. You can also use it for web application acceptance testing.
TestNG TestNG is a test framework originally inspired by JUnit and NUnit, but it introduces many new functions on the basis of these two. It is more powerful and easier to use. It provides annotation functions to support any large Tests for various available strategies are run in a thread pool (all methods in their own thread, one for each test class). With the introduction of annotations in JUnit 4 and the integration of the Hamcrest framework, the gap between JUnit 4 and TestNG has been narrowed.
Mockito Java has many mocking frameworks, such as PowerMock and JMock, but I personally prefer Mockito, which has a simple API, excellent documentation, and lots of examples. Mock testing is one of the key techniques of modern unit testing, developers can test code independently without relying on other situations, so I recommend that every Java developer should learn Mock framework to use with JUnit. My personal favorite Mock framework is Mockito, if you like, you can also learn about PowerMock or JMock. Spock Framework Spock is a testing and specification framework for Java and Groovy applications. It's written in Groovy, so it's very expressive and very canonical. Tests become more readable and maintainable when using Spock. Additionally, Spock is compatible with most IDEs, build tools and continuous integration servers thanks to its JUnit runner. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be many online courses about the Spock framework. The book "Java Testing with Spock" is a good learning resource.
Cucumber Cucumber is a good automated integration testing tool. Compared with other similar tools, its specification function is a major feature. Cucumber merges specification and test documents into one document, and since documents are also automatically tested by Cucumber, specification documents are always updated to the latest version.
Spring testing Spring MVC comes with a very useful testing framework for in-depth testing without involving the web container. This is a very useful library for writing automated tests for Spring applications. It provides strong support for writing unit and integration tests for Spring applications, including MVC controllers. There is also Spring Test DbUnit, which integrates the Spring test framework with DbUnit and HtmlUnit. Using these tools, you can easily complete automated testing of Spring MVC applications. DBUnit is an integral part of most Java applications, whether core Java programs or Java Web applications, and the database is probably the biggest obstacle to unit testing. Connecting to a Dev or UAT database for integration testing is unreliable because anyone can change data and schemas, such as tables and stored procedures, which will cause automated integration tests to fail. DbUnit is an extension to JUnit that initializes the database to a known state before each integration test, ensuring that the database contains the correct data. DbUnit is a very useful tool that helps us separate test data from test code.
Robot Framework Robot Framework is a general-purpose automated testing framework based on Python, mainly used for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development. It uses tabular test data syntax and is a keyword-driven testing framework. Verification of distributed heterogeneous applications often requires multiple technologies and interfaces, which are very suitable for testing with Robot.
Summary Above is all the tools, frameworks, and libraries for unit testing and integration testing for Java developers covered in this article. There are many more libraries not included in this list, such as AssertJ and Hamcrest, which can help you write beautiful and smooth test programs. With so many tools, you should first learn the ones that are most relevant to your day-to-day work. For example, if your job involves mostly Java UI, then you should learn Selenium first and then learn other tools to extend and improve yourself. Similarly, if you are working with a REST API, it is best to learn REST Assured first. If you're mostly working on core Java, then you should learn JUnit 5 first.
Author: Javin Paul
Translator: An Xiang
Editor: Yan Ze