Research and Configure separating Unit and Integration tests

[mrsbluerose]

Working through these recommendations:

Incorporating both unit and integration tests is a great approach to ensure the robustness of your application. Here's how you can organize your tests and set up your project to distinguish between unit and integration tests.

1. Directory Structure It's a good practice to separate unit tests and integration tests into different directories. Here's a suggested structure:

src/
└── main/
    └── java/
        └── com/
            └── savvato/
                └── tribeapp/
                    └── (Your main code here)
└── test/
    └── java/
        └── com/
            └── savvato/
                └── tribeapp/
                    └── unit/
                    │   └── (Unit tests here)
                    └── integration/
                        └── (Integration tests here)

• unit/: Contains your unit tests, which focus on testing individual components in isolation, usually with mocking.
• integration/: Contains your integration tests, which focus on testing how different components of the application work together, often involving the actual database or other external services.

2. Naming Conventions You can use naming conventions to help distinguish between unit and integration tests:

   • Unit Tests: Use the suffix *Test.java (e.g., UserRoleServiceTest.java).
   • Integration Tests: Use the suffix *IT.java (e.g., UserRoleServiceIT.java).

3. Maven Configuration To run unit tests and integration tests separately, you can configure Maven to recognize and execute them based on naming conventions or directory structure.

Here’s how you can configure Maven:

Unit Tests Configuration By default, Maven runs all tests in the src/test/java directory that match the pattern */Test.java.

Integration Tests Configuration You can use the maven-failsafe-plugin to handle integration tests. Here’s an example configuration in your pom.xml:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <!-- Plugin for running unit tests -->
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>3.0.0-M5</version>
            <configuration>
                <includes>
                    <include>**/unit/**/*Test.java</include>
                </includes>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>

        <!-- Plugin for running integration tests -->
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>3.0.0-M5</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>integration-test</goal>
                        <goal>verify</goal>
                    </goals>
                </execution>
            </executions>
            <configuration>
                <includes>
                    <include>**/integration/**/*IT.java</include>
                </includes>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

4. Running Tests You can run unit and integration tests separately:

• Unit Tests: mvn test
  • This will run all tests in the unit directory.
• Integration Tests: mvn verify
  • This will run all integration tests in the integration directory after running unit tests.

5. Best Practices

• Isolation for Unit Tests: Ensure that unit tests are isolated from external dependencies (e.g., databases, file systems) by using mocks and stubs.
• Realistic Environment for Integration Tests: Integration tests should mimic the production environment as closely as possible. Use real databases, queues, etc., and ensure proper cleanup to avoid side effects between tests.
• Keep Tests Fast: Unit tests should be fast, typically running in milliseconds. Integration tests may take longer but should still be optimized to run within a reasonable time frame.

CI Integration: Integrate both unit and integration tests into your Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline. Run unit tests on every commit and integration tests less frequently (e.g., on a schedule or before merging).