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TestNG Is A-OK


By Allen Holub
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July 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Test-driven development (TDD)—where you write the tests before you write the code, and run the tests every 10 minutes or so as you’re coding—is something everyone should be doing. Not only does TDD make the code go together faster with fewer bugs, but it also takes a lot of tension out of day-to-day programming tasks. The worst-case scenario when you introduce a bug is throwing away the last 10 minutes of work.

To practice TDD, however, you need an easy-to-use automated test environment, ideally one that can be customized for the work at hand. For example, you may want to run only a small set of localized tests every 10 minutes, with a more thorough, but slower, test pass every hour or so.

JUnit has been the standard for this sort of testing, but JUnit has its problems. It’s difficult to set up JUnit to run several disconnected tests in a single run, for example. There’s also no easy way to chain tests (where a test depends on the success or failure of a previous test—JUnit test methods each run in their own objects, even if they’re declared in the same class, so they can’t easily interact with one another). You also can’t get fine control over which tests run, so it’s difficult to customize a test suite to the code you’re working on right now.

I also have mixed feelings about JUnit’s insisting on putting test methods in special test classes. On one hand, the separate-class approach lets you exclude the tests from the shipped code. Just omit the .class files. On the other hand, I get nervous when the tests and the code aren’t in the same class definition. It’s too easy to not add a test when you add new code.

There is an alternative to JUnit that fixes these problems: TestNG (www.testng.org), a test framework written by C?dric Beust and ported to Java 1.4 by Alexandru Popescu. (There's a testing tutorial at membres.lycos.fr/testng.)




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