Tip #31 – Inject Common Reusable Capabilities via JUnit Rules
JUnit has an extremely useful extension mechanism – Rules. The @Rule annotation can help provide additional capabilities to your test methods. For example, ContiPerf provides annotations for performance testing. Similarly, you can provide reusable framework hooks for developers to use alongside their test methods.
Some examples where this can be applied – capturing test execution metrics and publishing to a API for offline trending/analysis or setting up plumbing components to facilitate in-memory db testing via H2db, or data folders, etc.
Implementing a JUnit rule is quite straight forward – here’s an article from David Gassner that provides a sample rule implementation.
Tagged: junit, software reuse, tips, unit testing
