Automated Software Testing: Unit Testing, Coverage Criteria and Design for Testability

Topic 1: Automated software testing

• Understand some basic principles of testing and whyit requires creativity.
• Get familiar withsome testing vocabulary, which improves our communication.
• Devise our first set of tests for a Java program and automatethese testsusing JUnit.
• Understand the differences between unit, integration, and system testing, as well as the testing pyramid.

Topic 2: Functional testing

• Learn how to read a requirement and derive the partitions, which are the actual concrete tests we will perform to make sure our system works (we call it "partitioning" and "equivalent partitioning").
• Learn how to think about and test possible corner cases, as developersoften forget to deal with such cases (we call itboundary testing).
• Get a few tips, based on experience, on common corner cases.

Topic 3: Structural testing and code coverage

• Learn how to analyze the structure of your source code and derive meaningful tests.
• Be able to use the most popular structural testing adequacy criteria, such as line coverage, branch coverage, and path coverage as well as to understand their differences.
• Derive a minimal set of tests when your branches (e.g., ifs) are too complex.
• Use a standard industry code coverage tool and interpret its results.

Topic 4: Testability and mock objects

• Understand the differences between different test levels (e.g., unit, integration, and system tests)
• Understand what makes a system more or less testable.
• Propose refactoring opportunities for increasing testability.
• Be able to apply mock objects in order to unit test a class.
• Understand when not to apply mock objects and go for integration tests.

Topic 5 : Test code smells

• Judge the internal code quality of your test suite and advice possible improvements.
• Understand and avoid flaky tests.
• Refactor and clean smelly test code.