Comments on: Maybe Tests Don’t Belong in Your Project

By: lumpynose

lumpynose — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 20:47:57 +0000

I actually use this method in my latest self-designated project, a web based photo album (original idea, eh?). In some ways it seems a lot better for deployment; for example, all of your jars needed for testing are in the test project (jmock, junit, spring-mock, etc.) so there’s less crud to filter out when making the war file; similar to the problem of filtering out the test classes as you pointed out. And I have a separate log4j.xml set up for my test project. But the downside is if you’re working in Eclipse, it’s not too savvy about this. It does have this thing where one project can depend on the other, so my test project depends on the main project, but the Spring xml config files aren’t found correctly. I forget the details but I have my applicationContext.xml and the two xml files it imports in my WEB-INF directory in the test project. Other than that I think it’s really great having them entirely separated.

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:24:49 +0000

JR, yes, that’s how I envisioned it. Each version of the app would have a corresponding test release. Although I suppose if you release a “bug fix only” release of your app, I wonder if you really need a whole new version of the tests? Maybe you only need new test versions when you break APIs in the core app.

By: JR

JR — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 13:58:01 +0000

I see the benefits to the approach, but what was your take on how tests get versioned? I assume that you’d still version your tests as you version your source base, but have the ability to run the source for 2.2 against the test sources of 2.2, 2.1, 2.0, etc to see if compatibility still exists.

By: Michael Böckling

Michael Böckling — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:09:21 +0000

You can do that easily with Maven 2. It uses different directory trees for app and test code, and it supports the automatic creation of a appname-tests.jar artifact that can be stored in the repository. I’m not sure if it would be all that easy to really perform the unit-tests automatically with earlier versions, though.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 05:42:03 +0000

I like it!