How to write a Unit Test?

Question

I have a Java class. How can I unit test it?

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In my case, I have class does a binary sum. It takes two byte[] arrays, sums them, and returns a new

Answer 1

Other answers have shown you how to use JUnit to set up test classes. JUnit is not the only Java test framework. Concentrating on the technical details of using a framework however detracts from the most important concepts that should be guiding your actions, so I will talk about those.

• Testing (of all kinds of all kinds of things) compares the actual behaviour of something (The System Under Test, SUT) with its expected behaviour.

• Automated testing can be done using a computer program. Because that comparison is being done by an inflexible and unintelligent computer program, the expected behaviour must be precisely and unambiguously known.

• What a program or part of a program (a class or method) is expected to do is its specification. Testing software therefore requires that you have a specification for the SUT. This might be an explicit description, or an implicit specification in your head of what is expected.

• Automated unit testing therefore requires a precise and unambiguous specification of the class or method you are testing.

• But you needed that specification when you set out to write that code. So part of what testing is about actually begins before you write even one line of the SUT. The testing technique of Test Driven Development (TDD) takes that idea to an extreme, and has you create the unit testing code before you write the code to be tested.

• Unit testing frameworks test your SUT using assertions. An assertion is a logical expression (an expression with a boolean result type; a predicate) that must be true if the SUT is behaving correctly. The specification must therefore be expressed (or re-expressed) as assertions.

• A useful technique for expressing a specification as assertions is programming by contract. These specifications are in terms of postconditions. A postcondition is an assertion about the publicly visible state of the SUT after return from a method or a constructor. Some methods have postconditions that are invariants, which are predicates that are true before and after execution of the method. A class can also be said to have invariants, which are postconditions of every constructor and method of the class, and hence should always be true. Postconditions (And invariants) are expressed only in terms of publicity visible state: public and protected fields, the values returned by returned by public and protected methods (such as getters), and the publicly visible state of objects passed (by reference) to methods.

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Many beginners post questions here asking how they can test some code, presenting the code but without stating the specification for that code. As this discussion shows, it is impossible for anyone to give a good answer to such a question, because at best potential answereres must guess the specification, and might do so incorrectly. The asker of the question evidently does not understand the importance of a specification, and is thus a novice who needs to understand the fundamentals I've described here before trying to write some test code.