Unit testing & integration testing

[TheGreyGhost]

Howdy all

 

I've got a general question about unit and integration testing in Forge.

 

I'm trying to write unit tests for some of my new classes and it's proving almost impossible any time my classes refer to any of the vanilla classes such as EntityPlayerMP or similar because writing stubs or mocks for them is just too complicated.  All I really need is to override a couple of the class methods with stubs, but the classes generally don't have a default constructor which makes it a real pain.

 

Anyone got any tricks you can recommend?  I'm currently resorting to inserting my test harnesses into the mod code and running it like a normal mod, which is pretty clunky.  Surely there's got to be a better way?

 

-TGG 

 

[sequituri]

Wow! How refreshing to find someone who is at least interested in testing prior to deployment. Unfortunately, I've had the same problem. As a result, I have just decided that integration testing was the only alternative. Unit testing would be doable, if and only if the Minecraft and ForgeModLoad code was writable and substitutable in the test environment, which it seems not to be.

[TheGreyGhost]

:-)

 

Ha yeah I've learnt the value of automated unit testing the hard way... subtle little bugs that made my database lose every 1024th row of data,  introducing a memory leak while fixing a different problem that caused my app to crash after running for 3 hours, an object-copying mistake between two classes that made the player disappear everytime he moved left and pushed fire at the same time.  Having to re-do 3 hours of extremely boring manual testing, twice, when fixing another bug.

 

Anyway - I got a suggestion in another forum which I'm trying out now:

http://objenesis.org/tutorial.html

 

It lets you instantiate classes without calling any of the constructors.  The object is in an invalid state of course (all member objects are null), but you can override its methods with your own stubs, pass the instantiated object to your class under test, and it will call them no problem.

 

I've just tested it on EntityPlayerMP and it worked a treat.

 

-TGG