Unit Testing Guidelines

Ravi had blogged about the difficulties of getting people to write unit tests. I could relate to him since I have come across this problem quite often.

IMHO a developer gets turned off from writing test cases because

1. Most developers dont have a clue on how to write proper unit tests. Most end up thinking integration test cases instead of unit testing.
2. Proper unit testing (not integration testing) is hard work and needs proper design
3. Estimating for unit test cases are not done or is under-estimated since we tend to have close to 2X lines of test code for a code of size X lines

Many times I have had to make developers understand what a unit test is and how to approach it. And this is the general guidelines i normally give them.

A unit test in my definition should

1. Should test only one class - Even if a method in the class under test, calls methods on other dependent classes, this test should be responsible only for verifying that this method works fine provided the dependent classes return correct values.
2. Continuing from 1, the dependent classes should have its own tests to verify all possible code flows. Doing this from a higher layer increases the # of test cases you have to write.
3. The unit tests for the higher layers (above DAO layer) should use Mocks (and ofcouse Dependency Injection). Use either jMock or EasyMock to mock out calls to other layers. If you are unit testing without Mocks it means you are doing integration testing between two classes since you verify functionality of both.
4. Test boundary conditions like what happens if you pass in a null object, what happens if your dependent class throws an exception etc.
5. Test that the class throws all exceptions declared in @throws (and any runtime exceptions) exactly under the conditions documented
6. Test DAO's even if you are using ORM tools, by using an in-memory DB like Derby or HSQL

In addition to above a code coverage tool like EMMA or Clover is a must have tool to capture coverage and draw attention to lesser tested parts of the application. Configure this to generate a daily/weekly report or better still hook it upto your cruise control. In most cases the developer themselves take it up as a challenge to get the code coverage up.

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Anemic Entities - Fallouts of an EJB era ?

When I first started working with EJB's the 1.0 and 1.1 versions, there were two types of enterprise beans

1. Session Beans
2. Entity Beans

We were all taught to put business logic into session beans and persist them using entity beans. No business logic was present in entity beans and it generally had only getters/setters. The only reason we were encouraged to put business logic in entities was to get performance gain - EJB tips.

According to OO principles the definition of a class states that a class should contain both structure and behaviour. And we ended up violating this first principle of OO by splitting our structure(entity/vo) and behaviour(model/services) into 2 separate layers (because of our tools ??). This anti-pattern has been termed as Anemic Domain Model by Martin Fowler.

This influence sort of carried on with most of the people. Even after EJB's lost the appeal and with IOC/ORM tools gaining popularity, people still architected systems where entities/value-objects/dto were a layer of objects having just get/set methods. These objects were read from DB using DAO's and sent to model/services layer where all business processing happened.

To be fair to people, the IOC containers of the day did not support DI'ing objects read from DB using tools like hibernate. With such excuses, we lived on writing more procedural style code with OO languages.

Now Spring 2.x has started supporting dependency injection on objects whose life cycle is outside its control. Using the @Configurable annotation Hibernate can create entity/dto objects from database and spring configures these objects a normal bean and wires up the dependencies.

Some more info regarding this can be found here and here.

To me creating an architecture where i can tell the domain object to go take of certain things leads to a very powerful api and also the system is easy to understand.

For e.g. I would like to do things like the following in my api's.

• order.ship() instead of shippingService.ship(order)
• movieRental.calculateLateFees() instead of feeService.getLateFees(Rental)

Coupled with a FluentInterface, I think this should be the future of enterprise apps (well atleast till erlang/haskell become more mainstream). This would make systems more easy to maintain and cleaner.

I did not make the relationship between the anemic-domain-like-design to EJB's till i proposed to a co-worker on adding more domain logic into the entities, the first response was

"This looks good, but should'nt we have all business logic in separate classes like how we did it using session beans"

And then it stuck me, things are not about to change for a long while !

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