I am writing functional tests using TestNG, and I have a few dozens of similar tests with different data. I would like to use DataProvider to reduce repeating code.
But some of those tests pass, some fail (due to a known defect). I want to disable failing tests until they are fixed, so they don't spoil whole picture of test run.
I see that AnnotationTransformer can change test annotations dynamically. Can AnnotationTransformer disable test only with some of the data sets? Or will it disable test with all provided data and it is better not to change anything?
Thanks in advance.
Why not simply put these failing tests in a group, say "broken", and exclude that test from your runs? Much simpler than using an annotation transformer, and the reports will show you which groups were excluded, so there is no risk to miss any when comes the time to ship.
Related
I am struggling a bit with the way how to write tests that reproduce an issue that has not been yet fixed.
Should one write the test and use wrong expectations and once the bug is fixed the developer will see the failure and adjust the expectations or should one just write the test with correct expectations and disable it. Once it is fixed you have to enable it again.
I would prefer the way to define wrong expectations and add the correct ones in comments and once I fix an issue I will immediately get a notification that it fails. If I disable it I won't see it failing and it will probably stay disabled until one will discover this test.
Are there any other ways doing this?
Thanks for your comments.
Martin
Ideally you would write a test that reproduces the bug and then fix said bug.
If for whatever reason that is not currently an option I would say that your approach of having the wrong expectations would be better than having an ignored test. Assuming that you use some clear variable name/ method name / comments that the test is more a placeholder and not the desired outcome.
One thing that I've done is write a test that is a "time bomb" reminder. I pick a date that is a few weeks/months out from now that I expect to be able to get back to it or have it fixed by. If I end up having to push the date out 2 or 3 times I end up deleting the test because it must not be that important.
as #Jarred said, best way is to write a test that express the correct expectations, check if it fails, then fix production code and see the test passes.
if it's not an option then remember that tests are not only to test but also to document. so write a test that document how your program does actually work. if necessary add a comment to the test. and don't write tests that are ignored - it's pointless. in future you can refactor your code many times, you could accidentally fix this test or introduce even more error in this area. writing tests that are intended to be long term ignored is just a waste of time.
don't be afraid that you will forget about that particular bug/test, just create a ticket in your issue tracking system - that's what it's made for.
if you use a testing framework that supports groups, you can add all those tests to be able to instantly exclude those test if needed.
also i really don't like the concept of 'time bomb tests'. your build MUST be reproducible - that's the fundamental assumption of release management, continuous integration, ability to pass your code to another team etc. tests are not meant to track and remind about the issues, it's the job of the issue tracking system. seriously, don't do it
Actually I thought about this again. We are using JUnit and it supports defining expectations on exceptions via #Test(expected=Exception.class).
So what one can do is write the test with the desired expectations and define the test with #Test(expected=AssertionError.class). Once the test will be fixed the test starts failing and the developer has to remove the expectation.
Can any one please tell me is there any kind of tools or eclipse base plugins available for generate relevant test cases for SalesForce platform related Apex classes. It seems with code coverage they are not expecting out come like we expect with JUnit, they want to cover whether, test cases are going through the flows of the source classes (like code go through).
Please don't get this post in wrong, I don't want anyone is going to write test cases for my codes :). I have post this question due to nature of SalesForce expecting that code coverage should be. Thanks.
Although Salesforce requires a certain percentage of code coverage for your test cases, you really need to be writing cases that check the results to ensure that the code behaves as designed.
So, even if there was a tool that could generate code to get 100% coverage of your test class, it wouldn't be able to test the results of those method calls, leaving you with a false sense of having "tested code".
I've found that breaking up long methods into separate, sometimes static, methods makes it easier to do unit testing. You can test each individual method, and not worry so much about tweaking parameters to a single method so that it covers all execution paths.
it's now possible to generate test classes automatically for your class/trigger/batch. You can install "Test Class Generator" app from AppExchange and see it working.
This would really help you generating test class and saves lot of your development time.
We use TestNG and Selenium WebDriver to test our web application.
Now our problem is that we often have several tests that need to run in a certain order, e.g.:
login to application
enter some data
edit the data
check that it's displayed correctly
Now obviously these tests need to run in that precise order.
At the same time, we have many other tests which are totally independent from the list of tests above.
So we'd like to be able to somehow put tests into "groups" (not necessarily groups in the TestNG sense), and then run them such that:
tests inside one "group" always run together and in the same order
but different test "groups" as a whole can run in any order
The second point is important, because we want to avoid dependencies between tests in different groups (so different test "groups" can be used and developed independently).
Is there a way to achieve this using TestNG?
Solutions we tried
At first we just put tests that belong together into one class, and used dependsOnMethods to make them run in the right order. This used to work in TestNG V5, but in V6 TestNG will sometimes interleave tests from different classes (while respecting the ordering imposed by dependsOnMethods). There does not seem to be a way to tell TestNG "Always run tests from one class together".
We considered writing a method interceptor. However, this has the disadvantage that running tests from inside an IDE becomes more difficult (because directly invoking a test on a class would not use the interceptor). Also, tests using dependsOnMethods cannot be ordered by the interceptor, so we'd have to stop using that. We'd probably have to create our own annotation to specify ordering, and we'd like to use standard TestNG features as far as possible.
The TestNG docs propose using preserve-order to order tests. That looks promising, but only works if you list every test method separately, which seems redundant and hard to maintain.
Is there a better way to achieve this?
I am also open for any other suggestions on how to handle tests that build on each other, without having to impose a total order on all tests.
PS
alanning's answer points out that we could simply keep all tests independent by doing the necessary setup inside each test. That is in principle a good idea (and some tests do this), however sometimes we need to test a complete workflow, with each step depending on all previous steps (as in my example). To do that with "independent" tests would mean running the same multi-step setup over and over, and that would make our already slow tests even slower. Instead of three tests doing:
Test 1: login to application
Test 2: enter some data
Test 3: edit the data
we would get
Test 1: login to application
Test 2: login to application, enter some data
Test 3: login to application, enter some data, edit the data
etc.
In addition to needlessly increasing testing time, this also feels unnatural - it should be possible to model a workflow as a series of tests.
If there's no other way, this is probably how we'll do it, but we are looking for a better solution, without repeating the same setup calls.
You are mixing "functionality" and "test". Separating them will solve your problem.
For example, create a helper class/method that executes the steps to log in, then call that class/method in your Login test and all other tests that require the user to be logged in.
Your other tests do not actually need to rely on your Login "Test", just the login class/method.
If later back-end modifications introduce a bug in the login process, all of the tests which rely on the Login helper class/method will still fail as expected.
Update:
Turns out this already has a name, the Page Object pattern. Here is a page with Java examples of using this pattern:
http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects
Try with depends on group along with depends on method. Add all methods in same class in one group.
For example
#Test(groups={"cls1","other"})
public void cls1test1(){
}
#Test(groups={"cls1","other"}, dependsOnMethods="cls1test1", alwaysrun=true)
public void cls1test2(){
}
In class 2
#Test(groups={"cls2","other"}, dependsOnGroups="cls1", alwaysrun=true)
public void cls2test1(){
}
#Test(groups={"cls2","other"}, dependsOnMethods="cls2test1", dependsOnGroups="cls1", alwaysrun=true)
public void cls2test2(){
}
There is an easy (whilst hacky) workaround for this if you are comfortable with your first approach:
At first we just put tests that belong together into one class, and used dependsOnMethods to make them run in the right order. This used to work in TestNG V5, but in V6 TestNG will sometimes interleave tests from different classes (while respecting the ordering imposed by dependsOnMethods). There does not seem to be a way to tell TestNG "Always run tests from one class together".
We had a similar problem: we need our tests to be run class-wise because we couldn't guarantee the test classes not interfering with each other.
This is what we did:
Put a
#Test( dependsOnGroups= { "dummyGroupToMakeTestNGTreatThisAsDependentClass" } )
Annotation on an Abstract Test Class or Interface that all your Tests inherit from.
This will put all your methods in the "first group" (group as described in this paragraph, not TestNG-groups). Inside the groups the ordering is class-wise.
Thanks to Cedric Beust, he provided a very quick answer for this.
Edit:
The group dummyGroupToMakeTestNGTreatThisAsDependentClass actually has to exist, but you can just add a dummy test case for that purpose..
I just started working on an existing grails project where there is a lot of code written and not much is covered by tests. The project is using Hudson with the Cobertura plugin which is nice. As I'm going through things, I'm noticing that even though there are not specific test classes written for code, it is being covered. Is there any easy way to see what tests are covering the code? It would save me a bit of time if I was able to know that information.
Thanks
What you want to do is collect test coverage data per test. Then when some block of code isn't exercised by a test, you can trace it back to the test.
You need a test coverage tool which will do that; AFAIK, this is straightforward to organize. Just run one test and collect test coverage data.
However, most folks also want to know, what is the coverage of the application given all the tests? You could run the tests twice, once to get what-does-this-test-cover information, and then the whole batch to get what-does-the-batch-cover. Some tools ( ours included) will let you combine the coverage from the individual tests, to produce covverage for the set, so you don't have to run them twice.
Our tools have one nice extra: if you collect test-specific coverage, when you modify the code, the tool can tell which individual tests need to be re-run. You need a bit of straightforward scripting for this, to compare the results of the instrumentation data for the changed sources to the results for each test.
I'd like to be able to set a condition from which to decide whether certain tests run in NUNIT.
For example if a global variable x = 1 then only run the tests from a certain class/assembly or only run the first test.
Is anything like this possible?
How would one go about doing this?
Thanks!!
I would recommend using Categories with your NUnit tests. This would allow you to run groups of them at a time, or all at once.
While Categories seem like the "more pure" way to do this, you could programmatically skip tests like this post asks: Programmatically skip an nunit test. It seems to me, this approach is what you're looking for though.