Effective Unit Testing with
MS Unit Testing Framework
Pratian Technologies (India) Pvt. Ltd.
[Link]
Introduction to Unit Test
Topics
What is Unit Testing?
Typical Unit Testing Problems
Best Practices for Effective Unit Testing
Tool Demo
Asserts
Exceptions
What to test for?
RIGHT BICEP
Characteristics of good testing
Mocks and stubs
Design and Testing
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Unit Testing
Unit Testing is code that
Is written by developers, for developers
Exercises a small, specific area of functionality
Helps “prove” that a piece of code does what the
developer expects it to do
For example, you might delete a pattern of
characters from a string and then confirm that they
are gone
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Unit Testing
Marick’s Four Quadrants of Unit Testing
Business Facing
Customer Exploratory
Tests Tests
Scalability
Programmer Performance
Tests Usability
Security
Technology Facing
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Unit Testing
Unit Testing fits into the Programmer tests category
here
It is not Acceptance Testing [Functional Testing]
Nor is it Performance or Scalability Testing
Used to test the code written by the user in-order to
ensure compliance with the requirement
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Unit Testing
Why Unit Testing ?
It will make your life easier
Better code
Better designs
Code is easier to maintain later
Confidence when you code
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Unit Testing
Common Excuses for not testing
I’m not a tester!
It takes too much time.
It takes too long to run the tests.
I don’t know how to test it.
I don’t really know what it is supposed to do, so I can’t test it.
But it compiles! It doesn’t need tests.
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Best Practices - Unit Testing
Start your development activities by writing down a list of things
you want to test
You will often think of a test while writing another one. When you
do, add it to the list.
Review your list frequently
Test-driven development (TDD) is a proven way of improving
quality*
TDD’s main objective is to aid programmers and customers
during the development process with unambiguous requirements
Use good tools
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Unit Testing
DEMO
(Sample implementation of
Microsoft Unit Test with Visual
Studio)
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Structuring Unit Tests
Test Code follows a standard formula:
Set up all conditions needed for testing (create any
required objects, allocate any needed resources, etc.)
Call the method to be tested
Verify that the tested functionality worked as expected
Clean up after itself
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Structuring Unit Tests
You write test code and compile it in the normal
fashion, as you would any other bit of source code in
your project
When it’s time to execute the code, remember that
you never actually run the production code directly
Instead, you run the test code, which in turn exercises
the production code under very carefully controlled
conditions
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Structuring Unit Tests
For Example:
If we have a method called CreateAccount()
This method encapsulates the behavior and we can test
the method with a method named CreateSavingsAccount()
Next test method can be CreateCurrentAccount()
Tests have to be organized on the behaviors and not
necessarily individual methods
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Asserts
There are some helper methods that assist us in
determining whether a method under test is performing
correctly or not
Generically, we call all these helper methods assertions
They let us assert that some condition is true; that two bits
of data are equal, or not, and so on
These methods will report
• failures [that’s when the assertion is false]
• errors [that’s when we get an unexpected exception]
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Asserts
Asserts are the fundamental building block for unit
tests;
Unit library provides a number of different forms of
assert as static methods in the Assert class
AreEqual
[Link](expected, actual [, string message])
This is the most-often used form of assert
Expected is a value you hope to see (typically hard-coded)
Actual is a value actually produced by the code under test
Message is optional that will be reported in case of failure
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Exceptions and Exception Testing
We might be interested in two different kinds of
exceptions:
Expected exceptions resulting from a test
Unexpected exceptions from something that’s
gone horribly wrong
Sometimes in a test, we want the method under test
to throw an exception
Consider a method which will help us divide two
numbers
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Exceptions and Exception Testing
If the second number is a zero, code is going to throw
an error informing us about DivideByZeroException
If the method already has the code checking for the
second number being 0 and if so throw
DivideByZeroException, then we would like to check if
the method is throwing the same properly
If exception is thrown, we can identify that in MSUnit
and the test would pass for given values [num2=0]
In short – we are checking if a method is throwing the
expected exceptions
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Exceptions and Exception Testing
If the method throws any other exception apart from
the one handled, then the test would give a negative
result
Once the expected exception fires, any remaining
code in the test method will be skipped
Unexpected exceptions, Unit Test will take care
accordingly
It will give us the entire stack trace right down to the
bug itself
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Setup and Teardown
Per-method Setup and Teardown
Each test should run independently of every other test; this
allows you to run any individual test at any time, in any
order
To accomplish this feat, you may need to reset some parts
of the testing environment in between tests, or clean up
after a test has run
Unit Test lets you specify two methods to set up and then
tear down the environment per test using attributes
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Question time
Please try to limit the questions to the topics discussed during the session. Thank you.
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Lab
A person has properties to access their age, full
name, and cash balance.
When instantiating a person, we should be able to
provide the first and last name, along with the age.
The person's full name property should return the
specified first and last names with a space in-
between.
When instantiating a person the cash balance should
be 100,000.
The cash balance should be reduced by the amount
spent on car purchase.
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Now that you know how to test, we need to look at
what to test; or more precisely, the kinds of things that
might need testing
It can be hard to look at a method or a class and try to
come up with all the ways it might fail and to
anticipate all the bugs
With enough experience, you start to get a feel for
those things that are “likely to break,” and can
effectively concentrate on testing in those areas
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
There are six specific areas to test that will help
strengthen your testing skills
RIGHT BICEP
Right — Are the results right?
B — Are all the boundary conditions CORRECT?
I — Can you check inverse relationships?
C — Can you cross-check results using other means?
E — Can you force error conditions to happen?
P — Are performance characteristics within bounds?
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Right Result
The first and most obvious area to test is simply to
see if the expected results are right—to validate the
results.
You can use data from file or XML or database to
check
If requirements are unclear, it can be verified with the
stake holders
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Boundary Conditions
Identifying boundary conditions is one of the most valuable
parts of unit testing, because this is where most bugs
generally live—at the edges
Some conditions you might want to think about:
Totally bogus or inconsistent input values, such as a file
name of "!*W:X\&Gi/w>g/h#WQ@“
Badly formatted data that is missing delimeters or
terminators, such as an e-mail address without a top-level
domain ("fred@foobar.")
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Empty or missing values (such as 0, 0.0, an empty string, an
empty array, or null), or missing in a sequence (such as a
missing TCP packet)
Values far in excess of reasonable expectations, such as a
person’s age of 10,000 years or a password string with
10,000 characters in it
Duplicates in lists that shouldn’t have duplicates
Ordered lists that aren’t, and vice-versa. Try handing a pre-
sorted list to a sort algorithm, for instance—or even a
reverse-sorted list
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
An easy way to think of possible boundary conditions is to
remember the acronym CORRECT
Conformance - Does the value conform to an expected format?
For Example:
Email id has to be in the correct format
Password has to be minimum 6 characters and one alphabet
Ordering - Is the set of values ordered or unordered as appropriate?
For Example
If while registering an order for a new customer, customer details
have to be added and then order has to be registered and finally
order items have to be stored
Range — Is the value within reasonable minimum and maximum
values?
For Example
Check if the value entered for age is between 1 and a maximum
value of 150
To check for min and max budget to on a shopping cart portal
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Reference — Does the code reference anything external
that isn’t under direct control of the code itself?
For Example
In a web application before we show the account
summary, user has to be signed in
Existence — Does the value exist (e.g., is non-null,
nonzero,
present in a set, etc.)?
For Example
Verify if user account exists after logging in
Verify if account object is not null, for a withdrawal
operation
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Cardinality — Are there exactly enough values? Zero –
one – n rule
For Example
Quiz will have questions. Min of 2 and max of 20
Quiz will have several of question references
Time (absolute and relative) — Is everything happening
in order? At the right time? In time?
For Example
Concurrency and synchronization to be taken care
Transfer of funds to outside banks only between
business hours
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Check Inverse Relationships
Some methods can be checked by applying their logical
inverse
For instance, you might check a method that
calculates a square root by squaring the result, and
testing that it is tolerably close to the original number:
[Test]
public void SquareRootUsingInverse() {
double x = [Link](4.0);
[Link](4.0, [Link](x*x).Within(0.0001));
}
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Check Inverse Relationships
You might check that some data was successfully
inserted into a database, then search for it, and then
delete it.
You might transfer money into an account, then
transfer the same amount out of the account.
For any of these operations apply an “inverse” to see
if you get back to an original state
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Cross-check Using Other Means
You might also be able to cross-check results of your
method using different means
Usually there is more than one way to calculate some
quantity
One would be used for production and we might pick the
other for testing
This technique is especially helpful when there’s a proven,
known way of accomplishing the task that happens to be
too slow or too inflexible to use in production code
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Cross-check Using Other Means
[Test]
public void SquareRootUsingStd() {
double number = 3880900.0;
double root1 = [Link](number);
double root2 = [Link](number);
[Link](root2, [Link](root1).Within(0.0001));
}
Separate pieces of data may be reported by objects of
different classes, but they still have to agree, and so
can be used to cross-check one another
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Force Error Conditions
In the real world, errors happen
Disks fill up, network lines drop, e-mail goes into a
black hole, and programs crash.
You should be able to test that your code handles all
of these real world problems by forcing errors to occur
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Force Error Conditions
Here are a few environmental things you could think
of
Running out of memory
Running out of disk space
Issues with wall-clock time
Network availability and errors
Insufficient File or Path permissions
System load
Very high or very low video resolution
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
What do we Test for?
Performance Characteristics
One area that might prove beneficial to examine is
performance characteristics
Not performance itself, but trends as input sizes grow, as
problems become more complex, and so on
For example we might want to find out the time taken to
read from an xml file and update database for about 10000
employees
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Question time
Please try to limit the questions to the topics discussed during the session. Thank you.
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Characteristics of good testing
A-TRIP
Automatic
They should be automated
Running continuously to test the code checked-in
Avoid intervention of manual process
Thorough
Good unit tests are thorough
Test everything that can break your code
Estimate the depth of your test needed
Repeatable
Every test should be able to run over and over again, in
any order, and produce the same results
Isolate the external dependencies like databases, global
variables
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Characteristics of good testing
A-TRIP
Independent
Tests need to be kept neat and tidy
Tightly focused, and independent from the environment
and each other [Other developers can also run the test]
Testing only one thing at a time
Tests should be on behavior and not the method
One method can have many test cases
Professional
Maintained to same standards as your production code
Test code is real code
Might need larger code base than production code
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Characteristics of good testing
Testing the tests
Testing code to make sure it works is a great idea
What happens when there are bugs in our test code ?
Two things you can do to help ensure that the test code
is correct:
Improve tests when fixing bugs
Prove tests by introducing bugs
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Characteristics of good testing
When a bug is found “in the wild” and reported back, that
means there’s a hole in the safety net—a missing test
Four simple steps to tackle this
Identify the bug, or bugs, that caused the errant behavior
Write a test that fails, for each individual bug, to prove the
bug exists
Fix the code such that the test now passes
Verify that all tests still pass (i.e., you didn’t break anything
else as a result of the fix).
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Question time
Please try to limit the questions to the topics discussed during the session. Thank you.
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Mocks and Stubs
The objective of unit testing is to exercise just one
behavior at a time, but what happens when the method
containing that behavior depends on other things
Hard-to-control things such as the network, or a database,
or even specialized hardware
There’s a testing pattern that can help: mock objects
A mock object is simply a testing replacement for a real-
world object
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Mocks and Stubs
There are a number of situations that come up where
mock objects can help us
The real object has nondeterministic behavior (it produces
unpredictable results, like a stock-market quote feed.)
The real object is difficult to set up, like requiring a certain file
system, database, or network environment
The real object has behavior that is hard to trigger (for example,
a network error)
The real object is slow or doesn’t exist
The real object has (or is) a user interface
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Mocks and Stubs
Using mock objects, we can get around all of these
problems
The three key steps to using mock objects for testing are:
Use an interface to describe the relevant methods on the
object
Implement the interface for production code
Implement the interface in a mock object for testing
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Mocks and Stubs
What we need to do is stub out
In many cases, stubs just implement an interface and
return dummy values for the methods in said interface
In even simpler cases, all the implemented methods in the
stub just throw a NotImplementedException
A common scenario is when there is a class that
encapsulates database access, but we don’t want to
actually configure and populate a database to run simple
tests
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Question time
Please try to limit the questions to the topics discussed during the session. Thank you.
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Unit testing offers several opportunities to improve the
design and architecture of your code as well
Few important areas to consider are
Designing for testability
Refactoring for testing
Testing the class invariant
TDD – Test Driven Design
Testing for invalid parameters
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Designing for testability
“Separation of Concerns” is probably the single most
important concept in software design and implementation
For example, suppose you are writing a method that
will sleep until the top of the next hour
public void SleepUntilNextHour() {
int howLong;
howLong= xxxxxxxxx;
Xxxxxxxxxx;
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;
[Link](howLong);
return;
}
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Designing for testability
How do we test this?
Do we wait for an hour? Set a timer and then call the
method and wait for it to return
Instead of combining the calculation of how many
milliseconds to sleep with the Sleep() method itself,
split them up:
public void SleepUntilNextHour() {
int howlong = MilliSecondsToNextHour([Link]);
[Link](howlong);
return;
}
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Designing for testability
Now we can test the methods separately
MilliSecondsToNextHour() can be tested if it is giving the right
value
SleepUntilNextHour() can be tested to see if the thread is put to
sleep mode properly
[Link](10000, MilliSecondsToNextHour(DATE_1));
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Refactoring for testing
Many a times we re-factor the code once it is tested or
even to accommodate unit testing
If there is a method which is internally implementing many
different pieces of logic, then it becomes difficult to test
When a test is run, it becomes difficult to know which piece
of code is actually resulting in an error
We then give scope for re-factoring of code
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Refactoring for testing
Consider a method to process an order RegisterOrder()
and has to send the total amount back for an invoice to be
generated
If this method also has to calculate the discount based on
the type of member placing the order, then it would be
difficult to test for incorrect calculations for members
So we divide the method into 2 RegisterOrder() and
GetDiscountForCustomer()
Now these methods can be independently tested
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Testing the class Invariant
A class invariant is an assertion, or some set of assertions, about
objects of a class
For an object to be valid, all of these assertions must be true.
They cannot vary
For instance, a class that implements a sorted list may have the
invariant that its contents are in sorted order
That means that no matter what else happens, no matter what
methods are called, the list must always be in sorted order
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Testing the class Invariant
Within a method, of course, the invariant may be momentarily
violated as the class performs whatever housekeeping is
necessary
But by the time the method returns, or the object is otherwise
available for use (as in a multi-threaded environment), the
invariant must hold true or else it indicates a bug
Possible areas where class invariants might apply
Structural
Mathematical
Data Consistency
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Testing the class Invariant
Structural
The most common invariants are structural in nature
For instance, in an order-entry system you might have
invariants such as:
Every line item must belong to an order
Every order must have one or more line items
Mathematical
Other constraints are more mathematical in nature
Debits and credits on a bank account match the balance
Amounts measured in different units match after conversion
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Testing the class Invariant
Often an object may present the same data in different ways
A list of items in a shopping cart
The total amount of the sale and the total number of
items in the cart are closely related
From a list of items with details, you can derive the other
two figures
It must be an invariant, that these figures are consistent
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Test Driven Development - TDD
Test-driven development is a valuable technique where you
always write the tests themselves before writing the methods
that they test
You start with what user wants and that results in writing
classes that you need and not just because statements in
your requirement doc says
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Testing and Design
Testing Invalid Parameters
Is your class supposed to validate its parameters?
Who’s responsible for validating input data?
Depends on the project. If UI layer is handing at the
boundaries, you don’t need to at class level
If not, then we need to handle at the class level
Mission critical applications and confidential systems may
think about validating at both ends
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
Introduction to Unit Test
Question time
Please try to limit the questions to the topics discussed during the session. Thank you.
Copyright © 2012 Pratian Technologies
[Link]
Unit Testing
