Configuring Java Test Tooling and Reaching 44% Code Coverage

TLDR

Configured test tooling for the backend Java application. Wrote initial unit tests to raise code coverage from 0% to 44%.

Main work

• Added Maven configurations for generating HTML test success/failure reports and overall code coverage metrics.
  • surefire reports maven plugin for test success / failures
  • jacoco maven plugin for generating code coverage reports
• Created unit tests for IAction and CatanGraph classes.

Challenges

• Mavens stages / goals / concepts are powerful but complicated. For the most part testing tools have been bootstrapped for me by someone else.
• Deciding first testing structure is important for “setting the tone” on the rest of the project.
  • I went with given, when, then patterns.
• Identifying the lowest hanging fruit that will up test coverage and actually increase confidence that I will catch breaking changes in the future.

Learnings

• @Data lombok notation is nice, but generates many methods like toHash() and isEqual(). This is not necessarily needed for some classes, and increases the amount of code that requires test coverage.
  • Two solutions: (1) use @Getter and @Setter if you don’t truly need hash functions or overrided equality checks. (2) setup test tooling to ignore the boilerplate methods generated by Lombok.
  • I went with the former for expediency, but the later is probably preferred.