Otaku, Cedric's weblog

Announcing TestNG 1.0!

I am happy to announce the availability of TestNG 1.0. A lot of changes have been made since the early releases thanks to the recent addition of Jolly Chen to the team.

As a quick reminder, TestNG is a testing framework using annotations to provide a more powerful way to test your code in various ways: unit, regression, functional, integration, etc... TestNG allows you to clearly separate your Java code from the way your tests are run. You never need to recompile any of your classes if you decide to run a different set of tests or suites.

TestNG also provides a very flexible configuration mechanism allowing you to specify arbitrary methods to be invoked at particular moments during your test run, such as "before every test method" or "after all the test methods have run".

Here is a quick example of what TestNG code looks like:

import com.beust.testng.annotations.*;

public class SimpleTest {

  @Configuration(beforeTestClass = true)
  public void setUp() {
    // code that will be invoked when this test is instantiated
  }

  @Test(groups = { "functest" })
  public void itWorks() {
    // This method will be invoked if the current run
    // includes the group "functest"
  }
}

Some of the major changes since the previous versions include:

• XML. The property files were easy to work with in the beginning but it was quickly obvious that they wouldn't scale. Now, the information for a suite run (which contains several tests, each test containing several classes) is conveniently located in one XML file.

• Dependent methods. With this feature, you can guarantee that certain groups of methods are always invoked before others. If the dependents didn't run or fail, the method will be marked as a SKIP, which can be seen as less critical than a FAILURE since SKIPs will typically be automatically resolved when the FAILURE that caused them is fixed.

• Groups of groups. Once you have specified that your test methods belong in specific groups, you can specify bigger groups, giving you a lot of flexibility on exactly what tests are run each time.

• Better reporting. Not only does TestNG have its own HTML reporting, it is also compatible with JUnitReport. You can see an example here.

• Open API. TestNG exposes its engine with a convenient set of listeners which allow you to plug-in your own reporting mechanism or for any other purpose (as a matter of fact, the JUnitReport code is such a listener). It is also trivial to invoke TestNG programmatically, thus skipping the XML phase and providing TestNG with direct Java objects.

The XML is fully validate and has a public DTD, but here is a quick description. testng.xml lets you specify a test Suite, which contains parameters and tests. Tests contain three kinds of data:

• Parameters, which override the Suite parameters.
• Groups, made of two parts, definitions and runs.
• Classes, which define which classes are going to be part of this test run

In turn, groups are made of two parts:

• Definitions, when you want to create groups that contain other groups.
• Runs, which specify the groups to be run.

The TODO list for future versions is pretty long but this version should give you a good idea of the future directions.

Download TestNG and try it, you won't regret it!

Posted by cedric at September 1, 2004 06:42 PM