Next Generation Java Testing: TestNG and Advanced Concepts (Paperback)

~ Cédric Beust (Author), Hani Suleiman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Enterprise Java developers must achieve broader, deeper test coverage, going beyond unit testing to implement functional and integration testing with systematic acceptance. Next Generation Java^™ Testing introduces breakthrough Java testing techniques and TestNG, a powerful open source Java testing platform.

Cédric Beust, TestNG's creator, and leading Java developer Hani Suleiman, present powerful, flexible testing patterns that will work with virtually any testing tool, framework, or language. They show how to leverage key Java platform improvements designed to facilitate effective testing, such as dependency injection and mock objects. They also thoroughly introduce TestNG, demonstrating how it overcomes the limitations of older frameworks and enables new techniques, making it far easier to test today's complex software systems.

Pragmatic and results-focused, Next Generation Java^™ Testing will help Java developers build more robust code for today's mission-critical environments.

This book

• Illuminates the tradeoffs associated with testing, so you can make better decisions about what and how to test
• Introduces TestNG, explains its goals and features, and shows how to apply them in real-world environments
• Shows how to integrate TestNG with your existing code, development frameworks, and software libraries
• Demonstrates how to test crucial code features, such as encapsulation, state sharing, scopes, and thread safety
• Shows how to test application elements, including JavaEE APIs, databases, Web pages, and XML files
• Presents advanced techniques: testing partial failures, factories, dependent testing, remote invocation, cluster-based test farms, and more
• Walks through installing and using TestNG plug-ins for Eclipse, and IDEA
• Contains extensive code examples

Whether you use TestNG, JUnit, or another testing framework, the testing design patterns presented in this book will show you how to improve your tests by giving you concrete advice on how to make your code and your design more testable.

About the Author

Cédric Beust, a senior software engineer at Google, is an active member of the Java Community Process who has been extensively involved in the development of the latest Java release. He is the creator and main contributor to the TestNG project.

Hani Suleiman is CTO of Formicary, a consulting and portal company specializing in financial applications. He is one of two individual members who has been elected to the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (October 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321503104
• ISBN-13: 978-0321503107
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #369,216 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars testng & rants, December 9, 2007

By	Jeanne Boyarsky (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

"Next Generation Java Testing" has a subtitle: "TestNG and Advanced Concepts." This isn't surprising given the creator of TestNG is an author, but is important to realize. It starts with 6.5 pages on why TestNG is better than JUnit 3.8. Then only two paragraphs on JUnit 4. This has been a pet peeve of mine for some time. It's like comparing the current version of C# to Java 1.3 and then saying Java is worse because it doesn't have generics.

I liked the code snippets in the TestNG sections as they focused on relevant pieces. The examples were to the point. Especially the performance and J2EE sections. I liked the concepts described in chapter 2 (over 100 pages.)

The authors describe open source libraries that integrate with TestNG. I liked this coverage although JMock could have used a code example for comparison (easyMock had one.) Ant targets were provided for the code coverage examples.

Chapter seven is titled "digressions." Some quotes from the text on this: "pet peeves, rants, annoyances and musings", "much ... very tangentially relevant", "some ... outright irrelavant." I agree with some and disagree with some. I think this chapter would have been better as a series of blog posts than a chapter in a book.

If you are using/planning to use TestNG and can ignore the rants, this is a good book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical Testing with a very good framework, February 1, 2008

By	D. M. Shetty (Fremont, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

At last a book that deals with testing applications (in java) that seems to be written by author's who have worked with real life, non trivial projects(TDD with adding two money objects together, anyone?).
This book describes using TestNG along with some advanced TestNG concepts and goes on to show how to use the framework to test out JEE projects. There are also chapters showing the developer how to integrate TestNG with other frameworks (like spring, DBUnit, jwebunit etc) which is useful as this is perhaps the only place where JUnit is better than TestNG. Inspite of the fact that TestNG documentation is pretty good, this book is worthwile buying (even if you use JUnit as your testing tool of choice).
There is useful coding and refactoring advice along the way(also a commentary on TDD), and a miscellaneous chapter of sorts which seems to have been written by Hani and edited by Cedric to remove all profanities!.
I do hope the author's expand the testing enterprise application bits to cover more testing scenarios and examples in later additions.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 5 with a Few Qualms, November 27, 2007

By	R. Williams "code slubber" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This was not the book I expected, but it makes a lot of sense that it turned out this way. Cedric is like the Martin Luther of the testing world. I ranted about a lot of the same things in JUnit, especially for instance, the whole crazy TestDecorator business, but Cedric just blew the house down. TestNG, after JUnit, was like getting out of jail.

So it makes sense that this book is a kind of exhaustive compendium of testing approaches, and as such, it succeeds, in most ways. There are a few things that don't show up, for instance, there is discussion of container testing, but Shale is not mentioned (unit testing JSF is made much better by it, and JSF is part of JEE5 so it deserves attention). The section on testing XML was good, considering dom4j, XMLUnit, etc., but it ends too quickly. For instance, what about using XPath statements? or some schema tools?

Given that Cedric's partner in crime, of Bileblog fame, was aboard for this outing, rants were bound to ensue, and they are mostly useful and add value, if they are rather tame. The one about logging left me just totally perplexed. Logging is not good? It's made out to be even possibly harmful? Say what? On the other hand, the rants about JUnit are on target. Their rant about using test coverage as a badge of honor is right on the money.

They even go into Spring's test mechanisms, and do a good job with it. Then they skate through Guice to discuss some of the advantages of preventing the spread into XML. Now, the lead argument here is that not only does the metadata produce bloat, but it puts logic out of the grasp of refactoring tools (an argument Cedric has used v. dynamic languages).

In an age where computer books are usually long articles, this book goes through a dizzying range of subjects, and does so without resorting to the bland repetition of documentation that is already out there. I could only have wished for a greater emphasis on innovation. The reason is that this book I am afraid will scare people who really need to be brought into the fold. It's pathetic, really, but most teams are still either not testing or doing crazy things like writing a few tests after delivering the code. For people who have dug around trying to get a lot of the right things into their test diet, this is the best guide available right now.