ABL Unit testing frameworks - Comparison

Do you have any additional details with regards to the release date?

Is there any chance that ABL Unit will be getting a mocking framework in the future?

We really need mocks/stubs to test interactions between objects, but generating these by hand in OOABL is very laborious & produces huge amounts of extra code that then has to be maintained.

This is the reason that we stopped using OEUnit in the past (even though we're very keen on unit testing).

I've only got experience of Java mocking.  For that, we're using Mockito as our main mocking framework & like it a lot.  

The Mockito API  makes for very nice test code & is popular enough to have been ported to a variety of different languages).

With it you can do things like: 

import static org.mockito.Matchers.*;
import static org.mockito.Mockito.*;

import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.mockito.Mock;
import org.mockito.MockitoAnnotations;


public class MyClassTest {

    @Mock private MyDependentClass mockMyDependentClass;
    private static String REQUIRED_PARAM_VALUE = "myParam";

    @Before
    public void setUp() throws Exception {

        // initialise mocking using annotations 
        MockitoAnnotations.initMocks(this);

        // Setup the mock to return a value if getNumberOfThings() is called with a parameter that .equals(REQUIRED_PARAM_VALUE)
        when(mockMyDependentClass.getNumberOfThings(eq(REQUIRED_PARAM_VALUE))).thenReturn(1);
    }

    @Test
    public void testThatdoStuffIsCalledWithMyParam() {
        // Create an instance of MyClass which uses the mock dependency
        MyClass classUnderTest = new MyClass(mockMyDependentClass);

        // Run the method that we're testing
        classUnderTest.doStuff();

        // Verify that the mock's method was called with a parameter that .equals(REQUIRED_PARAM_VALUE)
        verify(mockMyDependentClass).getNumberOfThings(eq(REQUIRED_PARAM_VALUE));
    }

}

... with MyClass.java being:

public class MyClass {

    private MyDependentClass dep;

    MyClass(MyDependentClass dep) {
        super();
        this.dep = dep;
    }

    public void doStuff() {
        // do some processing
        int numThings = dep.getNumberOfThings("myParam");
        // do some processing using numThings
    }
}

We also use Powermock to extend Mockito for some edge cases (like mocking statics) - that's more of a "nice to have".

Idea added - feel free to upvote :)

I just thought I would have a quick play with this, and am only seeing the internal procedures - were functions really skipped?

Stefan,

ABLUnti testing Framework doesn't support functions as tests.

As far as I know the current OEUnit can also be run from PCT. Could this be adjusted in the comparison?

Source: github.com/.../OEUnit

I wrote a mocking/testing doubles framework, to work alongside OEUnit, last year called OEMock. It's available on Github here: github.com/.../OEMock

So far, it works pretty well - I've been able to test it against a large production code set, and resolve issues from there. At the moment, it only support OEUnit, but could extend to ABLUnit with some changes. As ever, it's open source, so any issues logged or pull requests would be gratefully received.

Hope that helps,

Mark

I agree - I think that there are some features missing from the OEUnit side - for example Data Providers, and (currently undocumented) fixtures support. It can also produce test reports that can be read in to a CI engine in serveral different formats  (see the documentation for how to do this.)