Object Mentor Blog: Infinitest for Java, have you tried it?

<a href="http://infinitest.org/web/guest/home">Infinitest</A> for Java, have you tried it?

Brett Schuchert — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:35:00 -0500

Background

About 2 years ago, I was working with Ben Rady and he demonstrated something he was working on at the time: Infinitest. As often I am, I was a little interested but mostly skeptical – don’t know if that came across or not.

Since then he and others (e.g., Rod Coffin have made amazing strides and created plugins for both Eclipse and IntelliJ.

Taking it for a test run

Earlier this month, I finally decided to give it a test drive. When I made that announcement, Ben made the following (bold?) statement:

For me, using Infinitest is as different from TDD as TDD is from not testing

So is that true? Is using a continuous test execution tool as different from not using one as using TDD is from not testing? I’m not sure I’m there yet. However, I will say my brain is having some difficulty getting used to the cool feedback.

Here are two recent experiences I had using it.

Classpath Issues

Back at the end of 2006 I wrote a class on using JPA and EJB 3. I’ve not really done much to update that material in some years but recently I had an email from someone trying to work through the first tutorial with little success. Over the past few years there’s been some bit-rot. The embeddable container is not really up to date, EJB 3.1 includes an embeddable container as part of its spec, Hibernate has been updated, etc. So I spent a few hours tracking down updated jar files and building my classpath. I had already installed Infinitest and I noticed as added I something to my classpath, Infinitest would kick off and show a stack trace (my code was doing that in a @Before method). So I sped up what I was doing:

I directly edited the .classpath file in Eclipse
Saved what I was doing
Waited about a second
Noticed the new stack trace
Found the next jar file I needed to add
Repeat until tests passed.

Might sound like a bit of overkill, but in the end I built a classpath from scratch and I ended up adding 13 jar files. So it saved some time.

Note, I wasn’t looking for this. I had only installed Infinitest the day before so this was unexpected and welcome! Oh, and before my @Before method was handling the exception properly, Infinitest showed that the code had a problem (it was in the @After with a null pointer exception), which it indicated as an error like a syntax error or a validation error. Nice!

Using Mockito

I’ve recently been using Mockito. You can review a previous blog entry for that example. Today we’re holding the first coding dojo at the recently opened OkC CoCo. Last night I started working on the next problem I want to use for the next dojo. It involves practicing using a mockist approach. I set up my classpath, started writing tests and immediately I noticed what looked like a syntax error on the verification step of my first unit test. I was confused thinking I had an actual syntax error since I’m not quite to the point of touch-typing Mockito based tests (I did update Eclipse so I could more easily find the static imports).

Next, I updated my test to use the @Mock annotation. I removed the hand-written initialization and immediately I noticed a “syntax” error – null pointer exception. I was immediately (OK 1 second later) showed the impact of removing a single line of code. I added the missing line to auto-initialize the @Mock annotated fields but I did it incorrectly, so the error remained. I finally got the line correct and the “syntax error” went away.

Observations

Wow. That’s what I have to say so far. I’m not entirely sure the before and after of using Infinitest is the same size as moving from not testing to using TDD. Maybe it’s the same as moving from being Test Infected to practicing TDD. I was Test Infected several years before I practiced TDD.

I was also about as skeptical that moving to TDD from being Test Infected was useful. I was wrong. History tends to repeat itself, so I’m guessing, based on my initial resistance, that this is the future.

Embrace it.

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Oh, and before my @Before method was handling the exception properly, Infinitest showed that the code had a problem (it was in the @After with a null pointer exception), which it indicated as an error like a syntax error or a validation error. Nice!

"Infinitest for Java, have you tried it?" by Brett L. Schuchert

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:49:33 -0500

Helen wrote:

Are the circular links supposed to be funny or are they accidental?

Now that you point them out, they are kind of funny. However, no it was a loose nut between the chair and the keyboard (me). When I typed the href incorrectly and then cut and pasted it like mad.

Thanks! && Fixed!

"Infinitest for Java, have you tried it?" by Jake B

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:26:14 -0500

I know what you mean when you say that this is the future. I cannot develop without my autotest (part of the ZenTest gem for Ruby) which does effectively the same thing.

"Infinitest for Java, have you tried it?" by Helen

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:16:04 -0500

Are the circular links supposed to be funny or are they accidental? (All links to Infinitest in this blog post link back to the post itself – the only real link is carefully camouflaged in the post title.)