Testing Collections With Guava-Testlib and JUnit 4
Testing Custom Java Collections
Over the years I've built up a suite of unit tests for various types of java collections. When I started doing so, I didn't know of any good off-the-shelf means of generic collections testing. The JDK itself has some unit/regression tests, but not as many as you would think, and that aside they rely on a custom build system/testing framework.
I've used google-guava in a few projects but recently discovered their not so well advertised test support library: guava-testlib. I tried it out out on my most recent project (a custom random access list with deque operations) and I'm very impressed with the test coverage and flexibility. The documentation is sparse but once you get it working you'll have a test suite with hundreds to thousands of unit tests generated for your list, map, or set. Guava-testlib also generates tests for the non-standard collections in google-guava.
The library relies on JUnit, and most of what I found online detailing its use pertains to JUnit 3. There was a substantial API break between JUnit 3 and JUnit 4, as JUnit 3 relies on naming conventions and inheritance whereas JUnit 4 uses less intrusive annotations. I struggled for a bit trying to figure out how to get things working without resorting to the old JUnit 3 APIs. I arrived at something that works, but it's still a little dirty as it indirectly relies on a magic static method named suite() from the JUnit 3 days.
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package com.indigo.collections;
import com.google.common.collect.testing.*;
import com.google.common.collect.testing.features.CollectionFeature;
import com.google.common.collect.testing.features.CollectionSize;
import com.google.common.collect.testing.features.ListFeature;
import junit.framework.TestSuite;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.junit.runners.Suite;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;
/**
* Your test class must be annotated with {@link RunWith} to specify that it's a
* test suite and not a single test.
*/
@RunWith(Suite.class)
/**
* We need to use static inner classes as JUnit only allows for empty "holder"
* suite classes.
*/
@Suite.SuiteClasses({
ArrayListTest.GuavaTests.class,
ArrayListTest.AdditionalTests.class,
})
public class ArrayListTest {
/**
* Add your additional test cases here.
*/
public static class AdditionalTests {
@Test
public void testFoo() {
}
}
/**
* This class will generate the guava test suite. It needs a public static
* magic method called {@link GuavaTests#suite()} to do so.
*/
public static class GuavaTests {
/**
* The method responsible for returning the {@link TestSuite} generated
* by one of the {@link FeatureSpecificTestSuiteBuilder} classes.
* This method must be public static method with no arguments named
* "suite()".
*
* @return An instance of {@link TestSuite} for collection testing.
*/
public static TestSuite suite() {
/**
* guava-testlib has a host of test suite builders available,
* all descending from {@link FeatureSpecificTestSuiteBuilder}.
* The
* {@link FeatureSpecificTestSuiteBuilder#usingGenerator(Object)}
* is the main entry point in that collections are tested by
* implementing {@link TestCollectionGenerator} and providing an
* instance of the interface to the test suite builder via the
* #usingGenerator(Object) method. Most of suite builder classes
* provide a convenience method such as
* {@link ListTestSuiteBuilder.using()} that streamline the process
* of creating a builder.
*
*/
return ListTestSuiteBuilder
// The create method is called with an array of elements
// that should populate the collection.
.using(new TestStringListGenerator() {
@Override
protected List<String> create(String[] elements) {
return new ArrayList<>(Arrays.asList(elements));
}
})
// You can optionally give a name to your test suite. This
// name is used by JUnit and other tools during report
// generation.
.named("ArrayList tests")
// Guava has a host of "features" in the
// com.google.common.collect.testing.features package. Use
// them to specify how the collection should behave, and
// what operations are supported.
.withFeatures(
ListFeature.GENERAL_PURPOSE,
ListFeature.SUPPORTS_ADD_WITH_INDEX,
ListFeature.SUPPORTS_REMOVE_WITH_INDEX,
ListFeature.SUPPORTS_SET,
CollectionFeature.SUPPORTS_ADD,
CollectionFeature.SUPPORTS_REMOVE,
CollectionFeature.SUPPORTS_ITERATOR_REMOVE,
CollectionFeature.ALLOWS_NULL_VALUES,
CollectionFeature.GENERAL_PURPOSE,
CollectionSize.ANY
).createTestSuite();
}
}
}