Java Testing Weekly 2 / 2017

Author: Petri Kainulainen Published: January 9, 2017 0 comments

There are many software development blogs out there, but many of them don't publish testing articles on a regular basis.

Also, I have noticed that some software developers don't read blogs written by software testers.

That is a shame because I think that we can learn a lot from them.

That is why I decided to create a newsletter that shares the best testing articles which I found during the last week.

Let's get started.

Technical Stuff

Stubbing HTTP APIs and Microservices with the Hoverfly Java DSL describes how you can stub HTTP APIs with the Hoverfly Java library. Although I have some doubts about the implementation of this library (it is basically a wrapper for a Go executable), this library seems to have a clean API and it might be worth to take a look at it.

APIs and automated testing: Go integrated for the best of both worlds explains why should avoid "big bang" integration testing and describes the benefits of writing integration tests on the API level.
Flaky Tests: The Tester’s F Word describes three different mistakes that transformed a stable test suite into a flaky one. This blog post also provides three tips that helps you to avoid making the same mistakes as the author.
How I Write Tests describes four tips that help the author to write better tests. This is a quite useful blog post because it is very hard to say what kind of tests you should write (it depends from the implemented software), and posts like this help you adapt other people's experiences to your unique situation.
Unit testing is part of the job argues that unit testing is not just an additional expense that increases the overall price of the created software. I agree. My biggest problem of the argument: "we won't write unit tests because it's too expensive" is that these people most likely use the same excuse for not writing integration or end-to-end tests. In other words, these people end up writing legacy code.
Why Developers Are Poor Testers and What Can Be Done About It identifies five reasons why developers are not good at testing their own code and describes how you can overcome your limitations and become a better tester.