How fast is TDD exactly?

byJakub Nabrdalik
April 25, 2010
4 minute read

This is a true story, but for the sake of protecting some people, all the names and other details have been skipped or changed. It starts on some Thursday with some new guy asking me “how much TDD is slowing down the programmer”? I don’t have to think twice, my instant answer is: “programming with TDD is faster than programming without”. The guy doesn’t believe me, some other SQL guy joins, doubting as well. I see no point in explaining it to people who don’t touch OO code. They won’t believe anyway, as it is counter-intuitive, if you have not experienced it yourself. But then, life has a funny way of giving you proofs right when you need them. Next day I’m being asked to help put out some fire. There was a project running, two junior programmers were writing a small application, one of them doing the frontend, one doing the backend. No help from any senior or architect along the way. No code reviews, no pair programming, no nothing. Things, as expected, went terribly wrong, deadlines are weeks behind, the client is furious, and the software is not doing the stuff it’s supposed to. Oh, and the backend programmer is already on the way to another continent. Some guys tried to debug the problem, but after six hours of getting nowhere, they gave up. A classic FUBAR example. All right, I say. I know the frontend programmer, he’s a good guy, I like doing pair programming with him. He doesn’t know much about the other guy’s code, but he knows the business domain. I’ll help as much as I can. So we checks out the code, we setup the IDE and look inside the backend.

And the abbys looks back into us. We stare into the Eye of Terror. A complete chaos, infested with chaos spawns. A terrible place to look at. Things can break your mind in here. It’s twisted, it’s evil and it’s tragic. Pretty much every principle of OOP is violated. I could give it as an example of things that should not be, except I’d hurt the audience. There are no tests, there is a lot of faulty inheritance, with abstracts knowing about the children, there are hundreds of ‘ifs’, ‘elses’ and even some ‘case-switches’. Hell, there are even misleading comments! There is a ‘new’ keyword in every constructor, no IoC, no interfaces, no nothing. No sane mind can leave this place intact. We take a deep breath, and we try to find out where the problem might exactly be, but as we dig into this

Big Ball of Mud, we realize that the problem we are facing is just a tip of an iceberg. The software does not guarantee anything, and as far as we can tell, there is a shitload of bugs all around the place. The main algorithm is so twisted that it takes us hours to understand it, while the purpose of the whole thing is dead simple. Ok, so we’ve nailed down the possible problem. I’m suggesting writing a test to repeat the bug client had reported, and then fixing it, but the problem is, that the code, the way it is now, can only be tested end-to-end, so we have a lot of setup to do. My fellow programmer’s mind is already burned out, he asks me to call it a day. He also says, that he’d rather rewrite the whole module instead of digging any further, because if he has to look again into this mess, he will never be normal again. All right. I’m a bit more resistant, but I’ve not exhausted myself with debugging it before, and I’ve seen things, you people “wouldn’t want to believe”. So we set up an emergency pair programming session on Saturday. Now it’s late Friday, and I’m heading for two parties I’ve planned to visit that night. Saturday, 1pm. Sun is shining, weather is beautiful, girls are dancing in the middle of the town. I’m heading for the meeting. I’m expecting some heavy code crunching today, killing chaos monsters and stuff, but when I get there, the other guy says he couldn’t sleep. Knowing the main purpose and the twisted algorithms, he has been working till 4am, writing everything from the scratch. Maybe not everything, but the main stuff anyway. He’s been doing TDD, and though he has lost some benefits of discovering optimal interfaces/architecture, because he’s been writing interface-first, then Red-Green-Refactor style, he got it quite well. The code is doing about 80% of what it’s supposed to do, test coverage is sky-high (except for DTOs), there are some minor issues with ubiquitous language and so on, but for a single person junior programming this is a pretty sweet piece of code. “Great job” I say, amazed by his late-night work. What should we do now? So I help him write an acceptance test. We make it run all clean and green. We talk about the decisions he has made, I’m giving him advices and suggestions, but I can clearly see, that the guy has defeated an ugly dragon last night. He took his TDD spear, stormed the whole army of enemy warriors, killed them all and now he’s on his way for the princess. Well done man, If I had a medal with me, I’d give it to you right now. You deserve a big thanks from all of the humanity for putting the beast down. And he’s saying, that if he ever had doubts about TDD, he doesn’t have any now. He has really learned something that night, he gained a lot of experience points, and he has leveled up at least two times. There is still some work to be done, but it’s easy from now on. The client is safe and sound. And now for the conclusion: it took him LESS time to rewrite the whole module, using TDD, that it took, to find one bug in the old application. How’s that for an answer? PS: pictures are from www.studiocombo.pl

Jakub Nabrdalik

Solution Architect @ TouK

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WHUG 8. Beyond Hadoop – checking other options

byMarcin Cylke
November 26, 2012

W najbliższy czwartek – czyli 29.11.2012 – poprowadzę prezentację w ramach Warsaw Hadoop User Group. Swoją obecność można…

DDevelopment & Design

Spock basics

byRafał Nowak
September 7, 2013

Spock (homepage) is like its authors say 'testing and specification framework'. Spock combines very elegant and natural syntax with the powerful capabilities. And what is most important it is easy to use.

One note at the very beginning: I assume that you are already familiar with principles of Test Driven Development and you know how to use testing framework like for example JUnit.

So how can I start?

Writing spock specifications is very easy. We need basic configuration of Spock and Groovy dependencies (if you are using mavenized project with Eclipse look to my previous post: Spock, Java and Maven). Once we have everything set up and running smooth we can write our first specs (spec or specification is equivalent for test class in other frameworks like JUnit of TestNG).

What is great with Spock is fact that we can use it to test both Groovy projects and pure Java projects or even mixed projects.

Let's go!

Every spec class must inherit from spock.lang.Specification class. Only then test runner will recognize it as test class and start tests. We will write few specs for this simple class: User class and few tests not connected with this particular class.

We start with defining our class:

import spock.lang.*

class UserSpec extends Specification {

}

Now we can proceed to defining test fixtures and test methods.

All activites we want to perform before each test method, are to be put in def setup() {...} method and everything we want to be run after each test should be put in def cleanup() {...} method (they are equivalents for JUnit methods with @Before and @After annotations).

It can look like this:

class UserSpec extends Specification {
    User user
    Document document

    def setup() {
        user = new User()
        document = DocumentTestFactory.createDocumentWithTitle("doc1")
    }

    def cleanup() {

    }
}

Of course we can use field initialization for instantiating test objects:

class UserSpec extends Specification {
    User user = new User()
    Document document = DocumentTestFactory.createDocumentWithTitle("doc1")

    def setup() {

    }

    def cleanup() {

    }
}

What is more readable or preferred? It is just a matter of taste because according to Spock docs behaviour is the same in these two cases.

It is worth mentioning that JUnit @BeforeClass/@AfterClass are also present in Spock as def setupSpec() {...} and def cleanupSpec() {...}. They will be runned before first test and after last test method.

First tests

In Spock every method in specification class, expect setup/cleanup, is treated by runner as a test method (unless you annotate it with @Ignore).

Very interesting feature of Spock and Groovy is ability to name methods with full sentences just like regular strings:

class UserSpec extends Specification {
    // ...

    def "should assign coment to user"() {
        // ...
    }
}

With such naming convention we can write real specification and include details about specified behaviour in method name, what is very convenient when reading test reports and analyzing errors.

Test method (also called feature method) is logically divided into few blocks, each with its own purpose. Blocks are defined like labels in Java (but they are transformed with Groovy AST transform features) and some of them must be put in code in specific order.

Most basic and common schema for Spock test is:

class UserSpec extends Specification {
    // ...

    def "should assign coment to user"() {
        given:
            // do initialization of test objects
        when:
            // perform actions to be tested
        then:
            // collect and analyze results
    }
}

But there are more blocks like:

setup
expect
where
cleanup

In next section I am going to describe each block shortly with little examples.

given block

This block is used to setup test objects and their state. It has to be first block in test and cannot be repeated. Below is little example how can it be used:

class UserSpec extends Specification {
    // ...

    def "should add project to user and mark user as project's owner"() {
        given:
            User user = new User()
            Project project = ProjectTestFactory.createProjectWithName("simple project")
        // ...
    }
}

In this code given block contains initialization of test objects and nothing more. We create simple user without any specified attributes and project with given name. In case when some of these objects could be reused in more feature methods, it could be worth putting initialization in setup method.

when and then blocks

When block contains action we want to test (Spock documentation calls it 'stimulus'). This block always occurs in pair with then block, where we are verifying response for satisfying certain conditions. Assume we have this simple test case:

class UserSpec extends Specification {
    // ...

    def "should assign user to comment when adding comment to user"() {
        given:
            User user = new User()
            Comment comment = new Comment()
        when:
            user.addComment(comment)
        then:
            comment.getUserWhoCreatedComment().equals(user)
    }

    // ...
}

In when block there is a call of tested method and nothing more. After we are sure our action was performed, we can check for desired conditions in then block.

Then block is very well structured and its every line is treated by Spock as boolean statement. That means, Spock expects that we write instructions containing comparisons and expressions returning true or false, so we can create then block with such statements:

user.getName() == "John"
user.getAge() == 40
!user.isEnabled()

Each of lines will be treated as single assertion and will be evaluated by Spock.

Sometimes we expect that our method throws an exception under given circumstances. We can write test for it with use of thrown method:

class CommentSpec extends Specification {
    def "should throw exception when adding null document to comment"() {
        given:
            Comment comment = new Comment()
        when:
            comment.setCommentedDocument(null)
        then:
            thrown(RuntimeException)
    }
}

In this test we want to make sure that passing incorrect parameters is correctly handled by tested method and that method throws an exception in response. In case you want to be certain that method does not throw particular exception, simply use notThrown method.

expect block

Expect block is primarily used when we do not want to separate when and then blocks because it is unnatural. It is especially useful for simple test (and according to TDD rules all test should be simple and short) with only one condition to check, like in this example (it is simple but should show the idea):

def "should create user with given name"() {
    given:
        User user = UserTestFactory.createUser("john doe")
    expect:
        user.getName() == "john doe"
}

More blocks!

That were very simple tests with standard Spock test layout and canonical divide into given/when/then parts. But Spock offers more possibilities in writing tests and provides more blocks.

setup/cleanup blocks

These two blocks have the very same functionality as the def setup and def cleanup methods in specification. They allow to perform some actions before test and after test. But unlike these methods (which are shared between all tests) blocks work only in methods they are defined in.

where - easy way to create readable parameterized tests

Very often when we create unit tests there is a need to "feed" them with sample data to test various cases and border values. With Spock this task is very easy and straighforward. To provide test data to feature method, we need to use where block. Let's take a look at little the piece of code:

def "should successfully validate emails with valid syntax"() {
    expect:
        emailValidator.validate(email) == true
    where:
        email }

In this example, Spock creates variable called email which is used when calling method being tested. Internally feature method is called once, but framework iterates over given values and calls expect/when block as many times as there are values (however, if we use @Unroll annotation Spock can create separate run for each of given values, more about it in one of next examples).

Now, lets assume that we want our feature method to test both successful and failure validations. To achieve that goal we can create few parameterized variables for both input parameter and expected result. Here is a little example:

def "should perform validation of email addresses"() {
    expect:
        emailValidator.validate(email) == result
    where:
        email         result }

Well, it looks nice, but Spock can do much better. It offers tabular format of defining parameters for test what is much more readable and natural. Lets take a look:

def "should perform validation of email addresses"() {
    expect:
        emailValidator.validate(email) == result
    where:
        email           | result
        "WTF"           | false
        "@domain"       | false
        "foo@bar.com"   | true
        "a@test"        | false
}

In this code, each column of our "table" is treated as a separate variable and rows are values for subsequent test iterations.

Another useful feature of Spock during parameterizing test is its ability to "unroll" each parameterized test. Feature method from previous example could be defined as (the body stays the same, so I do not repeat it):

@Unroll("should validate email #email")
def "should perform validation of email addresses"() {
    // ...
}

With that annotation, Spock generate few methods each with its own name and run them separately. We can use symbols from where blocks in @Unroll argument by preceding it with '#' sign what is a signal to Spock to use it in generated method name.

What next?

Well, that was just quick and short journey through Spock and its capabilities. However, with that basic tutorial you are ready to write many unit tests. In one of my future posts I am going to describe more features of Spock focusing especially on its mocking abilities.