Most software has longer lifecycle than original intended. There is abundant software produced before incorporating unit testing as part of software development. In most cases, a software written without unit testing is harder to change. Though, there are a number of different testing schemes, but unit testing is most common. Unit testing performs testing of a single component in isolation. However, existing software often is very tightly coupled and difficult to test in isolation. Though, there are number of testing tools such as JUnit, TestNG and mock libraries, however these tools require developers to take time and refactor existing code and write unit tests. There aren't many tools that help developers take the pain of writing unit tests. Though, there are a number of tools that provide some assistance such as simple boundary tests, gui based functional testing, explaratory or random testing. But none of those tools offer support thorough support for testing or support white box testing and testing in isolation as required by unit testing.

As integration or functional testing use black box testing, it is difficult to test an module in an isolation. As opposed to these approaches, unit testing tests a single class or module in an isolation using white box techniques. In general unit testing uses mocks to abstract collaborating modules such as external services or database connections. This also help making unit testing an indispensable part of the software development cycle, because developers don't require to run real database servers or external services and help expediate development cycle. Also, running suite of unit tests takes a lot less time than running suite of integration tests so they can be run more often after each incremental change to the code.

Proposed Solution

TestPlayer toolkit helps legacy Java applications, i.e., applications without tests add testing capabilities seamlessly without any changes to existing applications and minimal configuration. It requires no changes to the application and supports both graphical interactive and non-interactive applications. For interactive applications, users will be drive application GUI to record usage scenarios. For non-interactive application, user will start the driver application that invokes application behavior. In TestPlayer terminology, this is referred to as playing the application. Though, recording application behavior from the graphical interaction is somewhat similar to some record-and-play tools that records GUI interaction of an application and then plays back the recorded data for performing regression or functional testing. However, that approach uses end to end black box testing and is a fragile because every time the interface changes, the user will have to rerecord the use cases. As opposed to black-box testing by recording the input and output at the external end only, TestPlayer records dynamic behavior of each public method that is invoked as part of usage scenario. In addition, it keeps track of all services that a class is collaborating. This data is then used to create mocks for all collaborating services. TestPlayer uses jMock and EasyMock for mocking collaborating services. These mock libraries support mocking both interfaces and concrete classes.

Major Features

• Generates automated Unit Tests (using JUnit 3.8, 4.0 and TestNG 5.0) along with mocks (jMock 1.2 and EasyMock 2.2) for dependent classes.
• Generates automated Integration and Functional Tests (using JUnit 3.8, 4.0 and TestNG 5.0).
• Generates automated Functional Tests using FitNesse.
• Records all data about public method invocation, which is used for regression, load and performance tests.
• Generates compile time and runtime method-level, class-level and package-level dependencies.
• Draws UML Sequence diagrams for all top-level methods to facilitate understanding of the system and debugging.
• Draws compile time and runtime association and dependency diagrams that facilitate writing tests and understanding the system.
• Provides feedback on software quality metrices and test coverage by integrating with various softwares such as cobertura, PMD, CheckStyle, Lint, FindBugs, JDepend, etc.