Running database tests faster using TestNG
In a recent project, I was doing some integration testing against database using DBUnit and JUnit. I was dealing with large datasets and as the tests grew, testing became painfully slow. Culprit: I had JUnit update the database with data for every test.
The data access layer for this project had lots of complex queries but the methods I was testing had two distinct behaviors: methods that read data from the database and methods that wrote data to the database. This simple observation made me realize that I can cut down the testing time by
– Grouping tests in to “read” and “write” groups
– Refreshing database and run ALL the tests in the “read” group (even better run them parallely)
– Refreshing database before running each and every test in the “write” group
Since JUnit does not provide a way to implement the above idea, I tried TestNG. Here is a simple java code of what I ended up doing:
public class RepositoryImplTest {
private void setupDataBase() {
// DBUnit code to refresh data
}
@BeforeClass(groups={"database.read"}, alwaysRun=false)
public void setupForRead() {
setupDataBase();
}
@BeforeMethod(groups={"database.write"}, alwaysRun=false)
public void setupForWrite() {
setupDataBase();
}
@Test(groups="database.read")
public void findAllXXX() {
}
@Test(groups="database.read")
public void findByXXX() {
}
@Test(groups="database.write")
public void updateXXX() {
}
@Test(groups="database.write")
public void removeXXX() {
}
@Test(groups="database.write")
public void createXXX() {
}
}
Here is the sample testng.xml file for the above code:
