JUnit tests for POJOs

Question

I work on a project where we have to create unit tests for all of our simple beans (POJOs). Is there any point to creating a unit test for POJOs if all they consist of is gette

Answer 1

It's probably worth a simple test to make sure you've not written

public void setX(int x) {
   x = x;
}

Although you should be coding to avoid that (by putting a final modifier on the method parameter, or similar). It also depends how you're generating your accessors, and if they could suffer from copy/paste errors etc (this will occur even in environments that try to enforce IDE usage - it just will).

My main concern with classes containing lots of setters/getters, however, is what is the class doing ? Objects should do stuff for you, rather than just hold and return data. If these are data entity objects then the setter/getter pattern may be correct. However the better pattern is to set the data in the object, and ask the object to do stuff with it (calculate your bank balance, launch the rocket etc.) rather than return the data and let you do it yourself!