Pattern your way
to automated regression testing
Tutorial Details:
Pattern your way to automated regression testing
Pattern your way to automated regression testing
By: By Kevin Pauli
Implement popular design patterns to overcome unit-testing hurdles
e have all heard the mantra: test, test, test. Unit test all mission-critical business logic. If possible, write the unit tests before you write the code. Test everything you can, and test it often.
Frequent testing is one of the extreme programming fundamentals, a set of practices growing in popularity because it provides a sound approach to dealing with the inevitable complexity and change of today's programming projects. But the simple mantra to test is much easier said than done, and far more often preached than practiced. Deadlines approach, managers loom, and important testing gets postponed yet again.
In the past, a major obstacle to adequate unit testing was the inherent startup costs to design and implement an acceptable unit-testing framework. Without a framework, unit tests were haphazardly implemented, and very difficult to aggregate into test suites that ran with the click of a button. Fortunately, Erich Gamma and Kent Beck have implemented Beck's Smalltalk unit testing framework in Java, called JUnit . This excellent framework, already the de facto standard for implementing unit testing in Java, provides the basic plumbing for developers to quickly generate whole test suites that validate their programs with the click of a button. With JUnit, a major excuse for eschewing unit tests has been obviated.
"Trade"-offs
However, there is a more pernicious obstacle to unit testing system parts that involve access to a database system. As an example, imagine a system that processes trade transactions in a stock market simulator. One or more external systems place trade orders into a database, which our simulator then reads and processes. Assume our goal is to implement this system as well as all the unit tests necessary to ensure its smooth run. You can easily test certain system parts with JUnit.
Now consider the object that calculates the transaction's dollar value. The test could simply create a Trade object with the desired arguments, and then assert that the getPrice() method returns the expected amount. But what about the TradeProcessor object, which reads and processes the incoming database requests? Suppose myriad combinations of incoming trade orders have different outcomes in our simulator, and we wish to test those various combinations as part of our JUnit suite. Could you unit test that part of the system? (If you're not convinced you can by the end of this article, I haven't done my job!)
We could approach unit testing this core logic in several ways. We could set up multiple test databases (one for each test case), and between each unit test, change the database the program queries. We would have to ensure that those databases are immutable, since we want subsequent runs to produce identical results. If the system's nature is such that merely running a test causes the database to produce different results (for example, by setting the status of "pending" trades to "processed"), this approach is very problematic indeed. What's more, you would then have to somehow keep all those databases, with their precise state necessary for successful unit tests, stored with that source code version. For most source code revision-control tools, this requirement would present a major problem.
Another approach might start with an empty database, and have each unit test populate it with the requisite data before executing the code to test. We would need to clean out the database between each test, so that tests could run in any order. Besides being potentially resource-intensive, this approach still suffers from the revision-control problem noted above (i.e., what if the database schema changes and becomes incompatible between releases?). Again, we are back to managing different database versions to test different software versions. Unit testing should be more seamless than this.
Fortunately, a more elegant solution exists that lets you unit test code that accesses databases, and tightly couple the code version to the database version the code expects to see, allowing both to version together in your source code repository. The solution involves, as you might expect, the subject of another mantra frequent JavaWorld readers know well: design patterns . More on those in a moment. First, we must decide on a test data form.
The X factor
Ideally, our test data should be self-contained and easily version-controlled. We would need a text format compatible with most version-control systems, and a human-readable form, which would ease test data creation and debugging. Due to relational data's hierarchical nature, a flat text file is not expressive enough without some implicit assumptions. Fortunately, our good friend XML (Extensible Markup Language) fits the bill perfectly. It is text, human-readable (when formatted properly), and easily expresses hierarchical structures. If we encode the whole test data set for a particular test as a single XML file, we can construct that file with a simple text editor, and easily version-control it right alongside the code for which it provides test data.
So, how do we create an XML document that simulates a database? The following XML "database" format was created for a real-life testing scenario, and works for most common querying scenarios. Let's suppose we want to model a database having two common queries, which we'll label "query1" and "query2" . "query1" takes one argument and returns two text columns. "query2" takes two arguments and returns one numeric column. The following XML document represents one possible database state:
value 1
value 2
value 3
value 4
value 5
value 6
value 7
value 8
value 9
value 10
11
When queried, this particular database returns a ResultSet with one row if "query1" executes with an argument of value 1 . A call to getString(1) on the ResultSet (i.e., get the value of the first column as text) returns value 2 . A call to getString(2) (the second column) returns value 3 . A subsequent call to resultSet.next() returns false, since only one result exists in the result set. Similarly, executing "query1" with a value 4 argument returns a ResultSet with two hits. And, executing "query2" with value 9 and value 10 arguments returns a ResultSet with one hit. A call to getInt(1) on this ResultSet returns the integer value 11 .
Although this XML database's structure is fairly simple, I've included a DataSource.dtd you can use to validate your XML data source documents for particularly large data sets.
Have I got a Bridge to sell ya
The first step toward achieving full unit-testability is to "abstract away" those system parts required to always act a certain way, but implemented differently in different circumstances. Let's assume we wish to retrofit a running application for testing. Here is TradeProcessor 's core logic, as it runs currently:
public final void processPendingTrades()
throws Exception
{
final String query =
"select id, account, transtype, symbol, quantity,
status " +
"from trades where status=
'" + Trade.STATUS_PENDING + "'";
Connection con = null;
Statement stmt = null;
ResultSet resultSet = null;
try
{
con = DriverManager.getConnection
("jdbc:db2:tradeDB");
stmt = con.createStatement();
resultSet = stmt.executeQuery(query);
while (resultSet.next())
{
final String id = resultSet.getString(1);
final String account = resultSet.getString(2);
final String transType = resultSet.getString(3);
final String symbol = resultSet.getString(4);
final int quantity = resultSet.getInt(5);
final String status = resultSet.getString(6);
final Trade trade =
new Trade(id, account,
transType, symbol, quantity, status);
process(trade);
}
}
finally
{
if (resultSet != null)
resultSet.close();
if (stmt != null)
stmt.close();
if (con != null)
{
con.rollback();
con.close();
}
}
}
This fairly standard code executes a query and steps through the result set, processing each row. When we run the application for real, the TradeProcessor must retrieve a list of currently pending trades from the database. In test mode, the TradeProcessor should retrieve that list from an XML file constructed specifically to test a particular situation.
An elegant, object-oriented approach to this problem inserts an abstraction layer between the processing logic and the implementation. In other words, the processing logic continues to act on an object that behaves like a ResultSet , but which may or may not actually talk to a real Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) database. The object represents abstractly a " ResultSet -like" object. The point is that the processing logic only cares that the object it talks to responds to commands such as next() and getString() . This approach of creating an interface for which the implementation may vary is so common in object-oriented programming that it has earned the distinction of being identified as the Bridge design pattern.
The solution then creates a new set of abstract types that capture the abstract nature of querying a data source and retrieving results. In addition to the ResultSet type, we must also create a DataSource type (which represents either the database or the XML file), and a Query type (which, when passed to the DataSource , allows the DataSource to create a ResultSet ).
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