One nice feature in JUnit 4 is that of Parameterized Tests, which let you do data-driven testing in JUnit with a minimum of fuss. It's easy enough, and very useful, to set up basic data-driven tests by defining your test data directly in your Java class. But what if you want to get your test data from somewhere else? In this article, we look at how to obtain test data from an Excel spreadsheet.

Any Test-Driven Development practitioner will tell you, Test-Driven Development is a design strategy, not a unit-testing technique. Writing unit tests are a means, not an end. The goal is to write better quality, more reliable, and more accurate code.

Test-Driven Development, or TDD, is often quoted as an essential Agile best practice, and so it is. It works wonders on green-fields projects and new code bases where you can start afresh and ensure that all your code is both easily testable and well tested. But what about legacy code? (By legacy code, I mean any code that does not have a comprehensive set of automated tests, so you might be writing legacy code as we speak). For most of us, most of the code we will ever work on will not have originally been our own work. And, unfortunately for the software industry, only a small fraction of code can really boast comprehensive unit and integration tests. How can techniques like Test-Driven Development make our work as developers more productive and less frustrating?

Let's not be pedantic. Write unit tests before you code a method, or after it - in my experience, it matters little, as long as you think about and write the tests at roughly the same time as you write the code. It's coming back to do the tests later (or not coming back at all) which causes problems. Personally, I like to write unit tests just before or immediately after writing small chunks of code - it doesn't break the flow, because it is part of the flow.

Easyb is a very cool way to test your Java application in BDD-style with Java. But wouldn't it be nice to be able to integrate your BDD stories into your Maven build process? The good news is, you can!