In one of our core services, the execution of a single unit test took approximately 30 seconds, while a single integration test ranged between 65 and 70 seconds. Running the entire test suite took circa 6 minutes.
Have you ever worked on a project where after downloading the code from the repository you start to wonder what business requirements are hidden under the layer of unreadable tests? Or maybe you are currently wondering how to test a new feature that you have been entrusted to implement?
Today, in an age of great popularity of test automation, we can observe a growing number of different frameworks which allow us to write scripts and programs that simulate human actions performed on the website under test. The most popular solution is Selenium WebDriver framework, which is compatible with the majority of common languages. Broad compatibility is a big advantage of Selenium especially in cases when we have to write some tests integrated to our application project, because no matter in which language we write the application, Selenium probably has an API for that language too. But there are also situations, like writing a standalone test suite, when we can decide which technology we’d most like to use. Taking into consideration this case, let me introduce to you a short comparison of three JDK-based technologies:
Groovy is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language for the Java platform. Its name comes from slang, where “groovy” means “cool”, “amazing” or “fashionable”. This programming language was designed to be so, but is it still groovy nowadays? Creator of Groovy, James Strachan, admitted that he wouldn’t have created Groovy if he had known anything about Scala. But his project started living its own life. Let’s take a look at what it has to offer us now.
One of the major goals of software development, apart from actually delivering the product, is to guarantee it is of proper quality and not prone to errors. Big modern systems tend to consist of dozens of smaller pieces, often accompanied by some legacy core or part of legacy system. Each of these, often very different pieces of software communicate with each other in some way, in synchronous or asynchronous way, through REST endpoints, SOAP services or a variety of messaging systems. This leads to new challenges. A failure or unexpected change in one place may lead to a misbehaviour in other parts of the system.
