Testing Grails

Experiences from the Field

whoami

Colin Harrington

Principal Consultant

Object Partners, Inc

colin.harrington@objectpartners.com

@ColinHarrington

Clustered, Load Balanced, Fault tolerant

Distributed applications

Distributed

Test the whole application.

Virtualize!

Apps,

Integration points.

System as a whole.

Testing Perspectives

jUnit

Continuous Integration

Automated Deploy

Fifty Shades of Testing

How much pain do you want?

Spectrum

Spectrum of continually running
Autotest
Running in your IDE?
grails test-app unit: package or class
grails test-app unit: (Just a phase)
grails test-app
Other phases & types

Know Your tools

Built-in stuff

Services
Controllers
filters
domains
constraints
command objects
codecs
GSP
UrlMappings
WebFlow

Spock!!

GMock

Groovy

JUnit, jUnit4 Assertions

Spock

Mocking Tools

GrailsMock and mockFor
in the GrailsUnitTestMixin
Groovy's MockFor (Capital M)
Spock's Interactions https://code.google.com/p/spock/wiki/Interactions

Continuous Integration

Jenkins

Phases and types

Segregate by package

parallell execution:

http://fbflex.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/a-script-to-run-grails-functional-tests-in-parallel/

Write descriptions in Spock Tests.

Make multiple line assertions

assert something != null
assert something.foo != null
assert something.foo.bar == 'baz'

JUnit tests

JUnit style assertions.

vs assert statement with Groovy.

Spock implicit assertions

Spock interactions, cardinality.

Build your own tools

Third Party API

Sandbox APIs

BetaMax

Build your own.

APIs

Testing Third party APIs

Learning the API,

Testing the API,

Testing your code.

Testing them together

(-warning- environments go down!)

Know your concepts

No IO in Unit tests
Unit tests just test your unit!
Mocks/Spies/Stubs

Unit being tested:

Class, Hierarchy, MethodLevel.

Unit being tested:

Class
Hierarchy
Method

TDD

vs

Post-Tramatic-Test-Driven-Development

Ideal vs Reality

Bug finding & swatting.

Write a new failing test confirming the bug to help you reproduce the issue.

Not always possible/easy with race conditions -then refactor so you don't have these issues.

Any area of code that is hard to test is prone to error and maintainability woes.

Fix the bug and watch your tests pass!

New Feature development shouldn't be complete without tests!

Developers & QA to enforce this.

Each unit of work should be covered in some level of tests.

IMO should be covered by multiple perspectives or dimensions.

Unit tested and covered in functional testing.

Optimize developer workflow

Developer workflow

IDE support
Command line familiarity.
GROM
Alias for opening tests.
Automagically open your HTML reports.

Process

Cut out real time to make this a priority.

Write (some) Tests Fridays

WTF

Testing has to be taught & learned.

Test your Javascript

(or front-end)

karma

testem

mocha

jasmine

http://grails.org/plugin/karma-test-runner

Test production

Load Testing

Jmeter, stick it in prod, see what happens.

Heard of a guy sticking HTTP Requests in REDIS and mass firing them off to create insane amounts of load.

Security Testing,

Pen Testing,

auditing.

Smoke Tests

Basic proof of core services

configuration

Performance Testing

Have metrics in place.

Log aggregation:

Make the cycle of testing, finding, fixing bugs faster.

Internal Bug tracking systems.

JIRA does a decent job

VCS

Branching & Tagging matters

Gerrit workflow

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Gerrit_Workflow

*always* resonably stable.

Automate your whole deployments

script it out

eliminate/minimize manual interaction.

Test coverage fallacy

ClassUnderTest.metaClass.methods.each {
	try {
		...it.invokeMethod....
	} catch (Throwable th) {}	
}

Test Quality

CodeNarc

Code Coverage

http://gmetrics.sourceforge.net

People

Over-the-wall QA
Embedded QA -

Building the code as you go.

Canary
User QA/UAT

Logging

Feature

(Test it)

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound?

If your code runs and left no traces of how it ran, how are you going to debug it?

Use Log Levels.

More traceability = easier to fix

Thank you

@ColinHarrington