Neal Ford presented several ideas, tools and libraries for more productive Java unit testing at Oredev 2010.
Ford suggested going outside the box and looking at writing unit tests in other JVM languages even if the target language is Java. “Always test a weaker language with a stronger one”, said Ford, suggesting that people should use Groovy to write Java unit tests. According to him, Groovy makes writing unit tests easier because it ignores privates and exceptions. Another option is JRuby. “Ruby guys have the coolest testing tools in the world”, said Ford. Java developers can use those tools with the help of JTestR, which makes it easy to write Java unit tests in JRuby and use standard Ruby testing tools for Java projects.
For teams working with J2EE technologies, he suggested using Mockrunner, which “stubs out J2EE by magic”, according to Ford. Mockrunner has stubs that provide out of the box functionality for JMS, JDBC, Servlet and many other J2EE APIs. It should allow unit testing of code that depends on J2EE APIs outside a container.
For teams that work with the Spring stack and related APIs, he suggested using Unitils, a “swiss army chainsaw of useful stuff”. It supports stubbing out Hibernate, Spring, JPA and similar APIs to speed up unit testing without having to really load the spring context or work against a database
