Author Archives: Jeanne Boyarsky

converting 2K+ tests to junit 5 in one day

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I set myself a goal to see if I could convert all the CodeRanch JForum tests to JUnit 5 in one day. And I mean with Java 5 package names, not just running them in JUnit 4 mode. (I wanted to see what edge cases I encountered). Let’s see how that went.

Forking

Ant doesn’t currently support JUnit 5. So I decided to create a fork of the code base for playing with JUnit 5. Which is fine. I wanted to automate as much of the process as possible so it’ll be easy to redo when the time comes. It’s also good because then I don’t have to worry about whether everyone’s IDE supports JUnit 5 yet. IntelliJ does if you are on the latest version and Eclipse does if you fiddle with it. Probably better to wait until after the official release of JUnit 5 and Eclipse before using JUnit 5 in the trunk anyway.

Scope reduction

I decided to only update the unit tests. We also have some functional tests with an odd hacked together way of loading the database.  (I wrote a lot of it so not criticizing others.) I’m sure this can be improved in JUnit 5. Will wait until release for that as well.

JUnit 3.8

We have 15 classes that still reference JUnit 3.8. They used a mix of a superclass that did inherit from JUnit’s test case and some that used JUnit 4 style annotations too. I decided to go through these by hand in the trunk (and my branch) and get rid of the references to JUnit 3.8. This was a pain because each one was a special snowflake. One even said it was deprecated with replacement code listed. But it took under an hour; a few minutes each. So not terrible.

As I was going, I missed noticing that the class missed annotation. I was excited to see that SonarLint flags this!

Migrating most of the code

I ran a program to migrate most of the code to the new syntax. Here’s the project on github.

This left me with 83 compiler errors to look at. Of those…

Manual clean up

  • Parameterized tests. The manual gives good examples of the options. Conversion was easy; I used a method source. I did run into two problems.
    • SonarLint false positive – If you only have parameterized tests, SonarLint still flags the class. This was fixed in Sonar per SONARJAVA-2390. However, SonarLint hasn’t been released since so need to ignore the error in my mind.
    • Eclipse false positive – If you only have parameterized tests, Eclipse doesn’t recognize it as being a JUnit test. I didn’t search to see if this was reported since it is so easy to work around. To “solve” both these problems, I added a non-parameteirzed test to the class.
  • Timeout. I had one test that used the @Test(timeout) parameter. It was clear from the manual how to convert this. I like that specifying the time uses Java 8’s Duration class. This lets you specify the timeout in a readable way rather than in milliseconds.
  • Expected exception. I had 16 tests that used the @Test(expected) parameter. I thought about automating this but decided against it. This is a good opportunity to add an assertion about the message to most of them. Which we should have done originally. But it was *so* easy to just write the type and be done with it before. Also, it isn’t 16 distinct classes. A number of them have multiple validation type methods.
  • About 25 of our tests use JMock. @RunWith(JMock.class) doesn’t go with JUnit 5. Since JMock was abandoned (last release in 2012), I decided to switch to the “long way” and call context.assertIsSatisfied(); for now. About half of them extend the same superclass at least. I also made a note that we should migrate away from JMock.

Then I attempted to run all the converted tests

I ran into one problem

  • One of our tests was relying on the order in which the @Before methods were run in the superclass. This behavior was never guaranteed and changed from JUnit 4 to JUnit 5. I fixed the code to not rely on the order. (And or course, the place this happened was a superclass test so it resulted in a large number of failures until I figured out what was going on!)

Observations

I met my challenge. 2K+ tests migrated in one day. And I observed that one superclass caused the vast majority of the special cases!

“why are you even here?”

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I went to part of the Toastmasters conference last week. At one of the sessions, I was on my tablet and the lady next to me said “why are you even here if you aren’t going to pay attention”. I was doing a mix of:

I obviously didn’t get into this with the woman who said this. But I did email myself that the answer would be a good blog post. I use a computer/tablet during conferences in two scenarios.

Scenario 1: I want to be fully immersed in the material

As noted in the presentation she was hassling me in, humans have a short attention span. Live blogging prevents me from being distracted. I’m *very* focused on what is going on because I’m listening and processing to write. This only leaves me with a tiny bit of spare brain power. Which I use for scanning comments from others ex: twitter.  And it prevents me from having enough brain power to attempt doing something that has the potential to steal my focus like email.

Now granted, I wasn’t live blogging at the Toastmasters conference. But it is common for me to do so at tech conferences. For example, see my QCon blog posts. Hard to argue I wasn’t paying attention there!

Scenario 2: Only listening some

Sometimes you are only interested in part of a session or the speaker isn’t great. Not bad enough to get up and leave. But not enough to want to pay full attention. (If I’m at a session after work on the weekend or on a vacation day, it’s completely up to me how much attention I pay.) And there’s an advantage to this. Paying partial attention, you might learn something. Leaving you guarantee you’ll learn nothing.

This Toastmasters event was on my vacation time and I paid the entrance fee. There were plenty of the empty chairs in the room so I wasn’t taking a seat away from someone who would pay full attention. And I didn’t sit in the front so I wasn’t taking up a “good seat”. So completely up to me what I wanted to do in the room. At least I wasn’t bothering anyone. I sat next to another person at this event (not this lady) who took notes by repeating what the speaker said into their phone.

As far as why did I come – I wanted to see what the semifinals and world championships of public speaking were like. And I wanted to go on vacation to Vancouver. So I combined the two. You can’t pay for just the speaking part; the educational sessions are bundled. So I went to most of them. They were good. But mainly inspirational or facts we’ve been exposed to. I don’t need to pay full attention to get what I’m going to out of that.

Conferences encourage this

The Toastmasters conference encouraged people to post in the activity stream of their app. (Like a poor man’s twitter.) They incentivized posting pictures rather than having discussions so the stream wasn’t comment rich. But they clearly didn’t discourage having your phone/tablet out. And they supplied internet. [By comparison there was a no phone/tablet policy during the world championships of public speaking at night.]

Now for the speaker’s side

My first public presentation was in 2011 at The Java Server Side Symposium. (Scott and I live blogged there too). I knew it is common at tech conferences for people to be doing other things while in a session – tweeting, email, coding, whatever. So I gave a presentation at my Toastmasters club called “The Case of the Distracted Audience”. I gave people specific annoying things to do and practiced reacting to them. It helped a lot.

 

 

junit 5 and intellij

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I use Eclipse at home for development. And mostly Maven (except for two projects that use Ant because some of the people working on them have less reliable internet connections).

After preparing to run JUnit 5 with Eclipse and Maven, I wanted to check the impact on IntelliJ. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried using IntelliJ. The internet says it supports JUnit 5 so I wanted to try it to confirm. I need to know this:

  1. So I know what IDEs people can use at my JavaOne JUnit 5 hands on lab
  2. So I know whether upgrading the CodeRanch JForum fork to JUnit 5 will be a problem for the developers using IntelliJ

Installing IntelliJ

  1. Download Mac version of free community edition from JetBrains
  2. Drag .dmg folder to Applications folder
  3. I chose not import settings. I don’t even remember the last time I ran IntelliJ on my Mac so those settings aren’t likely to be useful.
  4. After accepting the privacy policy, IntelliJ opens and I chose all the defaults.

Running the project

To run the project I migrated, I chose:

  • Check out from version control > git
  • https://github.com/boyarsky/oracle-java-cert-objectives-history.git and clone
  • IntelliJ asked if wanted to create a project based on the pom and I said yes
  • Choose command 1 for project view
  • Tried to open a Java class and got prompted to configure the SDK. I chose the latest Java 8 on my machine. No need to use Java 9 for what I’m doing. /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_xxx.jdk/Contents/Home
  • Build using build pulldown
  • Run using run pulldown

The result

IntelliJ was able to recognize the JUnit 5 annotations/methods and run them. It’s a bit ahead of Eclipse in this space so JUnit 5 won’t be a problem if they are using the latest version of IntelliJ.