What

Description

Approval Testing is an automation technique that can be more effective than traditional assertion-based test automation. For example when:

• The expected result is hard to calculate in advance, but easy to verify afterwards.
• The expected result has many aspects and details which are a lot of work to assert individually.
• You want to get high regression test coverage for existing code relatively quickly.

In this course you will learn about text-based approval testing using the tool “Approvals”. (We’ll use the Java version but it is also available in other languages such as C#, Python and C++).

Takeaways

• Use a diff tool to evaluate approval test failures and approve new results when appropriate
• Use the Approvals framework to write test cases for existing code where a Printer already exists
• Compare Approval testing with assertion-based testing and explain in which situations it has advantages
• Describe Text-based and Pixel-based approaches
• Describe the characteristics of Approval Testing

Prerequisites

I'm looking forward to the 99-minute workshop on Approval Testing. Please could you prepare by setting up the code on your local machine. You'll need to use a clone of the git repository (not a download) so that you can easily change branches. This is the repo:

https://github.com/emilybache/SupermarketReceipt-Refactoring-Kata

There are various subfolders for different programming languages. In this workshop, we will be using the Java version, which is in the 'java' subfolder. I suggest you:

1) Ask your IDE to 'open an existing project' and navigate to the 'pom.xml' file specifically.

2) Tell the IDE to 'open as project'. This will have the best chance of setting up all the dependencies correctly. When you've done that, try to run the unit test "SupermarketTest". It should pass if you have everything set up correctly.

As an optional additional step, there are some useful scripts you might want to get. To use them you will need Python3 installed. Clone this repo:

https://github.com/emilybache/ApprovalTools

For convenience, you could put this folder on your $PATH. Otherwise, make a note of the folder where you cloned the repo so you can easily access them.

Speaker

Emily Bache

Technical Agile Coach

Emily is a long-term proponent of agile development practices like Test-Driven Development, and is one of the pioneers of the professional developer teaching forum called ”Coding Dojo”. Emily is an author with Pluralsight, a contributor to the book “97 things every Java programmer should know”, and a regular conference speaker.