What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started, opens with a motivational section about the benefits of JUnit testing and warms up with a short coverage of the toolchain used throughout the book. After these preliminaries, the example project is kicked off, and writing the first unit test offers the opportunity to introduce the basics of the test-driven development paradigm.
Chapter 2, Writing Well-structured Tests, explains why the four fundamental phases' test pattern is perfectly suited to test a unit's behavior. It elaborates on several fixture initialization strategies, shows how to deduce what to test, and concludes by elucidating different test-naming conventions.
Chapter 3, Developing Independently Testable Units, shows you how to decompose big requirements into small and separately testable components and illustrates the impact of collaboration dependencies on testing efforts. It explains the importance of test isolation and demonstrates the use of test doubles to achieve it.
Chapter 4, Testing Exceptional Flow, discusses the pros and cons of various exception capture and verification techniques. Additionally, it explains the meaning of the fail fast strategy and outlines how it intertwines with tests on particular boundary conditions.
Chapter 5, Using Runners for Particular Testing Purposes, presents JUnit's pluggable test processor architecture that allows us to adjust test execution to highly diverse demands. It covers how to write custom runners and introduces several useful areas of application.
Chapter 6, Reducing Boilerplate with JUnit Rules, unveils the test interception mechanism behind the rule concept, which allows you to provide powerful, test-related helper classes. After deepening the knowledge by writing a sample extension, the chapter continues with the tools' built-in utilities and concludes by inspecting useful third-party vendor offerings.
Chapter 7, Improving Readability with Custom Assertions, teaches the writing of concise verifications that reveal the expected outcome of a test clearly. It shows how domain-specific assertions help you to improve readability and discusses the assets and drawbacks of the built-in mechanisms, Hamcrest and AssertJ.
Chapter 8, Running Tests Automatically within a CI Build, concludes the example project with important considerations of test-related architectural aspects. Finally, it rounds out the book by giving an introduction to continuous integration, which is an excellent brief of the test first approach and establishes short feedback cycles efficiently by automation.
Appendix, References, lists all the bibliographic references used throughout the chapters of this book.
