I’ve just returned from Ireland, where I was presenting a seminar on Clean Code Practices for Java Developers at the Paddy Power Technology Series. You can view my presentation notes.

I also gave a presentation introducing Thucidydes, which included a live coding demonstration. You can find out more about it.

While there I also trained two teams at Paddy Power (an online betting agency, for those who don’t know) in Test Driven Development, Acceptance Test Driven Development, and Automated Web Testing. They were very happy to receive the training and were interested to find out how using clean coding practices could improve their overall code quality. I was really impressed with the Paddy Power teams’ level of technical expertise. (And for those of you in Ireland, or looking to move, they are currently recruiting!)

Dublin is a great city and I really enjoyed my time there. Here’s a scenic shot of the famous Ha’penny Bridge over the Liffey River that runs through the fair city of Dublin. I hope to be back again soon!

Add comment (0)

Sometimes it's useful to be able to pass information between steps. For example, you might need to check that a client's details entered into a registration form appear correctly on a confirmation page later on.

You could do this by passing values from one step to another, however this tends to clutter up the steps. Another approach is to use the Thucydides test session, which is essentially a hash map where you can store variables for the duration of a single test. You can obtain this session map using the Thucydides.getCurrentSession() static method.

@Step
public void notes_publication_name_and_date() {
    PublicationDatesPage page = pages().get(PublicationDatesPage.class);
    String publicationName = page.getPublicationName();
    DateTime publicationDate = page.getPublicationDate();

    Thucydides.getCurrentSession().put("publicationName", publicationName);
    Thucydides.getCurrentSession().put("publicationDate", publicationDate);
}

Then, in a step invoked later on in the test, you can check the values stored in the session:

public void checks_publication_details_on_confirmation_page() {

    ConfirmationPage page = pages().get(ConfirmationPage.class);

    String selectedPublicationName = (String) 
Thucydides.getCurrentSession().get("publicationName");
    DateTime selectedPublicationDate = (DateTime) 
Thucydides.getCurrentSession().get("publicationDate");

    assertThat(page.getPublicationDate(), is(selectedPublicationName));
    assertThat(page.getPublicationName(), is(selectedPublicationDate));

}

If no variable is found with the requested name, the test will fail. The test session is cleared at the start of each test.

Web tests are as a rule much slower than other types of tests, but they can be sped up significantly by running them in parallel. However, this is often harder to implement than it sounds. The latest version of Thucydides (version 0.6.0) comes with support for running parallel test batches, making this task much easier.

Hamcrest is a neat little library that lets you write more fluent and readable tests. For example, rather than writing:

    assertEquals("red", color);

    assertThat(color,is("red"));

A version of Hamcrest is actually bundled with JUnit. However it is somewhat dated, and the more recent versions of Hamcrest come with a lot more features, particularly with regards to working with collections. You can use the latest version of Hamcrest by using the junit-dep dependency instead of junit, and configuring your dependencies as shown here:

    <dependency>
	    <groupId>junit</groupId>
	    <artifactId>junit-dep</artifactId>
	    <version>4.10</version>
	    <scope>test</scope>
	    <exclusions>
	        <exclusion>
	            <groupId>org.hamcrest</groupId>
	            <artifactId>hamcrest-core</artifactId>
	        </exclusion>
	    </exclusions>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
	    <groupId>org.hamcrest</groupId>
	    <artifactId>hamcrest-library</artifactId>
	    <version>1.3.RC2</version>
	</dependency>