Why structure your integration tests ?

When the number of integration tests grow is a good practice to separate the tests based on the feature/api that they are testing.

The advantages of doing this are:

  • easier to maitain as the tests for a specific feature/API are grouped in a specific category
  • easier to run the tests only for that specific category when only that feature changes to get faster feedback
  • easier to group the tests when running them in Jenkins/Travis CI or any other CI so that multiple jobs can be run in parallel and also when a job fails imediatelly the team will know which feature/API has failed

How is this done using Java, JUnit and Maven ?

  1. Create a basic Maven project
  2. Create a new package in the src/main/java with the name “tutorial.junit.categories” in which the different categories will be added.
    The structure of the project should look like below:
  3. Create a few JUnit test cases in a few test classes. In our case we are going to create:
    •  LoginApiTestIT.java
    •  SearchApiTestIT.java
  4. Create a few categories in which we want to split the tests. In our case we are going to split them as follows:
    • LoginApiCategory – tests run against the login api
    • SearchApiCategory – tests run against the search api
    • SmokeTestCategory – which includes tests from either Login or Search API tests that we want to run as smoke tests
  5. A category is just an empty interface as in the example below:
  6. Setting the category for each of the tests. For setting the category we just need to add the @Category annotation either at the class or method level as  below.
  7. Example below:
    
    package tutorial.junit;
    
    import org.junit.Test;
    import org.junit.experimental.categories.Category;
    
    import tutorial.junit.categories.LoginApiCategory;
    import tutorial.junit.categories.SmokeTestCategory;
    
     @Category(LoginApiCategory.class)
     public class LoginApiTestIT {
    
     @Category(SmokeTestCategory.class)
     @Test
     public void shouldReturn200ForValidCredentials(){
        System.out.println("Running Login API tests - Positive case");
     }
    
    @Test
     public void shouldReturn404ForInvalidCredentials(){
        System.out.println("Running Login API tests - Negative case");
      }
    }
    
    
  8. Running the tests based on the category is pretty simple using the Maven commands below. Open the Maven pom.xml file location in your terminal and run the following commands:
    • running the login tests
      
      mvn clean install -P integration-test -Dgroups="tutorial.junit.categories.LoginApiCategory"
    • running the search tests
      
      mvn clean install -P integration-test -Dgroups="tutorial.junit.categories.SearchApiCategory"
    • running the smoke tests which include tests from login and search
      mvn clean install -P integration-test -Dgroups="tutorial.junit.categories.SmokeTestCategory"

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