The single most effective way to improve code quality

Developer testing practices are a vital, yet often under-used art. Learning how to write more effective tests is an excellent way to write better designed, more maintainable and more reliable code. It also helps keep development focused on the real requirements, resulting in a higher quality product for the end user. This is a skill that every Java developer needs to master.

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Outline

This course is an intensive 2-day workshop with a mixture of teaching and lab exercises. You will learn about modern Agile testing best practices such as Test-Driven Development and Behaviour-Driven Development, and how to apply them in your own projects. You will gain practical experience with the latest in open source testing tools, including JUnit 4.7, Groovy, Selenium, SoapUI, and JOLT-Award winner easyb. You will also learn how to refactor code, and how to use code coverage and code quality tools such as Cobertura to isolate poor quality or poorly-tested code. The basic course program is outlined here:

• A gentle Introduction to Test-driven Development and Behaviour-Driven Development
• Getting started with TDD
• Continuous Testing in Eclipse with Infinitest
• JUnit Kung Fu - Fixtures, Hamcrest asserts, Exception testing, Timeouts, Parameterized tests, Rule annotations
• Using Mocks and Stubs for state-based and interaction-based testing with Mockito
• Refactoring best practices
• Database testing with DBUnit
• Testing Spring applications
• Testing Servlet-based applications
• Testing a web interface with Selenium and JWebUnit
• Test-Driving Legacy Code
• An Introduction to Acceptance Test Driven Development
• Writing more expressive unit tests in Groovy
• Behaviour-Driven Development in Java: easyb and jbehave
• Automating the testing process
• Using test coverage metrics to improve your testing process

Course Objectives

Students will come away from this workshop with a solid understanding of how they can improve their unit and integration testing practices back in the real world, as well as an abundance of practical tips and tricks that they can use in their day-to-day work. Notably, after the course, students will:

• Know how to write effective unit tests, and understand how to use unit testing practices to write more reliable code faster.
• Understand the principles of, and know how to apply, Test-Driven Development and Behaviour-Driven Development.
• Be able to write more concise and more expressive tests using Groovy
• Be able to use easyb to write BDD-style tests.
• Be able to write automated database and web interface tests.
• Be able to write automated web service tests.
• Be able to write unit tests for legacy applications.
• Be able to use mocks and stubs, and libraries such as Mockito, to write faster and more reliable unit tests, be more confident in thier code, and reduce the need for slow integration tests.
• Understand how to use code quality and test coverage metrics to improve your code, and understand what the various metrics can tell you, and also what they can't.

Course schedule

General Information