Whitepaper: Accelerate Unit Testing of Spring Applications with Parasoft Jtest and its Unit Test Assistant

With the Spring framework being one of the most popular Java enterprise software frameworks, development teams need a guided, automated approach to testing.

Find out how guided unit test creation reduces maintenance in Spring applications and accelerates test creation.

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Download the white paper to learn how Parasoft Jtest’s Unit Test Assistant improves the workflow and outcomes for Spring application testing.

Focus areas:
  • Why testing spring applications can be difficult
  • How Parasoft Jtest’s Unit Test Assistant makes testing easier
  • The process of generating Spring tests with the Unit Test Assistant
  • …and much more!

The Spring framework is one of the most popular Java enterprise software frameworks. With the growth of agile, time is essential and the burden of unit testing is a bottleneck for development teams. Parasoft Jtest provides a guided, automated approach to testing, making it easier and more efficient.

Parasoft Jtest’s Unit Test Assistant is an IDE plugin that helps guide users through the unit testing practice with easy one-click actions for creating, scaling and maintaining unit tests. By using the Jtest Unit Test Assistant, users can achieve higher code coverage while cutting in half the time and effort of unit testing, all while reducing the specialized expertise needed to build a comprehensive and meaningful suite of Junit test cases.

Parasoft Jtest integrates with existing technologies and is not a vendor locked solution. It easily integrates with the developer’s IDE (Eclipse or IntelliJ) while leveraging existing open source frameworks (i.e. JUnit for unit test creation and execution; Mockito and PowerMock for mocking). Since there are no dependencies on Parasoft libraries, it’s simple and easy to run the tests created by Jtest in an existing continuous integration (CI) process.

The Spring framework offers nice support for integration testing, but a lot of manual coding is required to set up test cases properly. Building and maintaining tests for Spring applications presents developers with a unique set of challenges, including the following:

  • The Spring framework must be initialized and configured.
  • The application usually has third-party library dependencies (persistent storage, external services, etc.).
  • Applications often use built-in Spring features for sessions, security, messaging, etc. These can be tricky to set up for developers who are new to Spring testing.
  • Application dependencies (i.e. beans) need to be configured appropriately.
  • These challenges, combined with the fact that writing comprehensive and maintainable test suites takes a lot of time in general, result in developers not writing enough tests. In turn, this leads to security vulnerabilities, defects, regressions, in addition to extra time and cost.

Ideally, unit tests should be fully automated, predictable, and maintainable. However, creating tests like this is time consuming and requires focused effort and skills.

Parasoft Jtest’s Unit Test Assistant helps solve these problems by eliminating the need to create unit tests, freeing the developer to focus on the business logic of those tests and create more meaningful, maintainable test suites. The Unit Test Assistant helps developers write Spring tests in multiple ways:

  1. Auto-generating the boiler-plate code for Spring MVC tests quickly
  2. Auto-generating parameterized tests for increased test coverage
  3. Mocking dependencies to isolate the helper method and simplify the test
  4. Collecting coverage data and analyzing test flow at runtime
  5. Providing recommendations with quick fixes to improve tests

Complex applications use libraries, APIs and core projects or services that are built and maintained by someone else. Spring developers must leverage existing functionality as much as possible so they can spend time and effort on the business logic of the application. To gain efficiencies, it’s best to leave the reusable implementation to libraries, however, applications end up with lots of dependencies.

Focusing unit tests on application code requires better isolation of the application from dependencies. One option is to create specialized “testing” versions of these dependencies. However, using a standardized library like Mockito provides benefits over this approach for multiple reasons:

  • There’s no need to write and maintain the special “test” code.
  • Mocking libraries can track invocations against mocks, providing an extra layer of validation.
  • Standard libraries like PowerMock provide additional functionality, like mocking static methods, private methods or constructors.
  • Knowledge of a mocking library like Mockito can be re-used across projects, whereas knowledge of custom testing code can’t be reused.

The Parasoft Jtest Unit Test Assistant provides test automation plus guided test creation and dependency management to accelerate test creation and reduce maintenance.

About Parasoft

Parasoft’s software testing solutions support the entire software development process, from when the developer writes the first line of code all the way through unit and functional testing, to performance and security testing, leveraging simulated test environments along the way. Parasoft's unique analytics platform aggregates data from across all testing practices, providing insights up and down the testing pyramid to enable organizations to succeed in today's most strategic development initiatives, including Agile/DevOps, Continuous Testing, and the complexities of IoT. Parasoft’s automated software testing innovations fuel software development organizations, helping teams reduce the time, cost, and effort of delivering high-quality software to the market.

Our technologies reduce the time, effort, and cost of delivering high-quality software.

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