Junit’s Theory’s as interprested by Schauderhaft and Groovy

JUnit theories sound promising.  Many a time a developer writes a whole lot of @Tests along the lines of testParameterXzero(), testParameterXone(), testParameterXmaxInt(). The test code may be almost identical apart from the parameters being used in the class/method under test which is redundant and prone to error.

Theories offer a sound alternate, specifying a single test method, with a different set of annotations to the regular @Test defining a field or annotation based ParameterSupplier to inject a series of values into each test.

Schauderhaft’s blog provides a great summary of what theories are and how to write a parameter supplier to supply a series of datapoints in Java. The annotation based ParameterSupplier does look a little verbose but as Schauderhaft points out, they can be reused – annotation based data fixtures – excellent. I liked these two posts because they do a better job at explaining than the release notes. The blog also links to a blog about another Junit4 feature – parameterised tests – that seem to be a precursor to Theories, and a little simpler to setup. Another great source of how to use Theories is actually in the Groovy documentation about Junit integration. Closures make Datapoints a little more concise (or maybe the example is just simpler? hehe) along with the fact that test data (lists,maps) have a groovy conciseness to them to begin with.