Preface

Humans are not perfect thinkers. At the time of this writing, software engineers are human beings. Most of them. For that reason, writing high-quality, useful software is a really difficult task. As we will discover in this book, software testing is one of the most important activities carried out by software engineers (that is, developers, programmers, or testers) to warranty a level of quality and confidence in a given piece of software.

JUnit is the most used testing framework for the Java language, and one of the most remarkable in software engineering in general. Nowadays, JUnit is much more than a unit testing framework for Java. As we will discover, it can be used to implement different types of tests (such as unit, integration, end-to-end, or acceptance tests) using different strategies (such as black-box or white-box).

On September 10, 2017, the JUnit team released JUnit 5.0.0. This book is mainly focused on this new major release of JUnit. As we will discover, JUnit 5 has supposed a complete redesign of the JUnit framework, improving important features, such as modularization (JUnit 5 architecture is completely modular), composability (the extension model of JUnit 5 allows to integrate third-party frameworks in the JUnit 5 test lifecycle is an easy way), and compatibility (JUnit 5 supports the execution of JUnit 3 and 4 legacy tests in the brand-new JUnit Platform). All of it, following a modern programming model based on Java 8 and compliant with Java 9.

Software engineering involves a multidisciplinary body of knowledge with a strong impetus for the change. This book provides a comprehensive review of many different aspects related to software testing from, mainly following an open source point of view (JUnit is open source from its inception). In this book, in addition to JUnit, you learn how to use third-party frameworks and technologies in our development process, namely, Spring, Mockito, Selenium, Appium, Cucumber, Docker, Android, REST services, Hamcrest, Allure, Jenkins, Travis CI, Codecov, or SonarCube, among others.