Welcome to JUnit in Action. JUnit is a framework that was started by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma in the late 1995. Ever since then the popularity of the framework has been growing and is now the de-fact standard for unit-testing Java applications.
This book is actually a second edition. The first edition was a best-seller, written by Vincent Massol and Ted Husted in 2003, and was dedicated in version 3.x of JUnit
We will try to cover the newest version of JUnit - 4.5, and will talk about lots of features that were included after the first edition of the book. At the same time we will try to focus on some other interesting techniques in testing your code - mock objects, JUnit extensions, testing different layers of your application and so forth.
This part will start by exploring JUnit itself. We will focus on the other tools and techniques further in the book.
The first chapter will give you a very quick introduction to the concepts of testing. You need this knowledge to get you jumpstarted. You will get straight to the code and see how to write a very simple test and how to execute it and see the results from it.
The second chapter introduces a JUnit at its most. We build a bigger project and walking over the code we will let you know not only of the JUnit concepts, widgets and guts, but also we will show you the best-practices in writing a test-case and will demonstrate them with the project we have.
The third chapter is dedicated on tests as a whole. We describe different kinds of tests, and the different scenarios to which they apply. We will also get to know the different platforms (development, production, etc.) and will show you which tests and which scenarios are best to execute there.
The last chapter in this part of the book is dedicated on improving your testing skills. We will show you how to measure your test-coverage and how to improve it. How to produce testable code before you write your tests and how to write the tests before you write a single line of code.