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Unit Tests Test Case – Is My Code Output Correct

November 20, 2013 by kiranbadi1991 | Comments Off on Unit Tests Test Case – Is My Code Output Correct | Filed in Development, Others, Testing

One of the goals for writing unit tests is to ensure that code does what it is supposed to do. When we write and compile the code, we know it gets through perfectly without any errors. However not having any errors do not necessarily mean that it does what it’s supposed to do. We need to have some mechanism to know that the code produces the results we require and we also have other means to validate the code output. Your test case for Unit test should test for results or code output validity.

Consider the below simple program add 2 numbers (I know this example is too easy and not practical one ,however this is best example coming to my mind now while writing this post,sorry I do have some great unit tests for my piece of code, I will share those as well later on) 

public class AddTwoNumbers {

public double add (double number1, double number2) {

Return number1 + number2;

       }

   }

The Intended purpose of AddTwoNumbers is to take 2 double values and do the addition. We need some mechanism to know that when this program gets executed we are indeed doing addition and program is also not giving us back any runtime exception. Probably we can write the test for this program something like below, 

public class AddTwoNumbersTest {

public static void main(String[] args) {

AddTwoNumbers addtwonum = new AddTwoNumbers();

double output = addtwonum.add(40,50);

if (output != 90) {

System.out.println("Bad result: " + result);

                      }

                }

    }

One of the other ways to test this program is with Junit and use its assertEquals Method. 

import static org.junit.Assert.assertEquals;

import org.junit.Test;

public class AddTwoNumbersTest {

@Test

public void testAddTwoNumbers() {

AddTwoNumbers addtwonum = new AddTwoNumbers();

double output = addtwonum.add(40,50);

assertEquals(60, result, 0);

            }

 }

Junit probably is one of the best library for unit testing the java code. Probably sometimes later I will write more on Junit. In case while writing the code ,the requirements are not clear, then probably making some assumptions surely helps. However we need to ensure that our assumptions are repeatedly clarified with users or relevant stakeholders.

So the first unit test case for your piece of code should be to verify that your code does what it is supposed to do.


 

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Unit Testing–What to Test

October 9, 2013 by kiranbadi1991 | Comments Off on Unit Testing–What to Test | Filed in Development, Others, Quality, Testing

One of the frequent discussions I often get into with developers especially in agile projects is how to write the test case for the class or method and what should we be testing in the unit tests.

There seems to be difference in opinion among folks as what unit test case needs to cover? Or what should we be testing with unit tests?

Should we write the test for both positive and negative input values or should we write the test that shows the code is just enough working? Or should we write the test case for all the possibilities that the code is going to fail or it’s going to be used?

All of these questions seems to be perfectly valid and there isn’t a single right answers to it. However based on my experience and little bit of wisdom, I can say that if you are working with experienced veteran programmer, then probably he will suggest that we write test cases for all possibilities and if you are part of team where everyone is young or most of them are in their midlife, then probably they will not be bothered and will ask you to write tests that shows the code is working as expected. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this approach either, however I feel it’s good that more unit tests we write, better the shape of project in the downstream phases, however this needs to be done correctly and results should be obviously visible. It does not make sense that we do unit testing for every piece of code flow and there are thousands of defects logged by the QA in the later phase. This just don’t make sense economically nor from the management prospective.

So probably I will focus on areas which I feel developers need to focus in their unit testing in this post without getting themselves buried in the art of functional testing,

There are infinite number of ways the code might fail, it might fail due to environmental changes, code might fail due to data changes or it might fail due to real bug in it. All these conditions happens all the time in various environment. So it’s practically not possible to know the failure mode beforehand. However being the developer of the code, we do assume that our code will be working will be working certain fixed environment with certain fixed perquisites for it to run. So it’s always better that we do some assumption and use our time judiciously for writing tests which reflects real time behavior.

I would suggest each of the unit tests exercised on the code under test should minimum show that.

  • The output given the code is correct and it does give us expected results.
  • Extreme boundary conditions for the input values are handled correctly.
  • Error handling is done appropriately by the code.
  • Tests should exercise the performance of the code under test

Maybe in next post I will come up with proper example to show as how to prepare test cases for each of the above conditions. We need to ensure that our unit tests are lean and thin in nature and we need to test just enough code.

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How to Identify Slow Running SQL Query in MYSQL 5.5x

October 1, 2012 by kiranbadi1991 | Comments Off on How to Identify Slow Running SQL Query in MYSQL 5.5x | Filed in Database, Development, Environment, Performance Engineering, Testing

From past couple of days I have also been playing around with MYSQL 5.5X Database doing some bit of writing queries, creating tables, indexes ,routines here and there for one of project. MYSQL database seems to be bit easy to understand and provides almost all similar features as provided by MSSQL or Oracle. (Of course there might be some difference in the ways they are designed or in the way they use SQL).

As soon as someone reports that application is slow or during test if we find slowness, the find thing we need to do is to identify cause of slowness (Most people don’t do this step, they become defensive, at times even I have exhibited this behavior,its humanly approach). There could be many ways to identify the cause of slowness and there could be many reasons for this slowness. However for the sake of this post let’s assume that we have identified the slowness as MySQL database and we have ruled out other causes for this slowness.

In order to identify the slow running MySQL query, one can run the below command in MySQL workbench or via MySQL client and see whats going on in the MySQL box,

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the current input statement.

mysql> show full processlist\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
     Id: 1
   User: root
   Host: localhost:51606
    db: mydb
  Command: Sleep
   Time: 372
  State:
   Info: NULL
*************************** 2. row ***************************
     Id: 2
   User: root
   Host: localhost:51607
     db: mydb
Command: Query
   Time: 58
  State:Query
   Info: SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE auto_id = 46102

 

As you can see from above that Select statement in itself is taking around 58 secs to execute.In addition to above,Show Process List command can also be used to get  insights as which threads are running in MySQL server and it is quite often used to debug connection issues.This link will provide more info about this command.

Once we know which SQL is taking more time, then the next task here is to replicate the issue outside the application using the same data and same statement but with using  MySQL client. Only when we are able replicate this issue outside application, we can say that issue is with SQL Query and not with any other elements of the environment or application.In almost all cases replication of issue happens successfully.(However do watch out for those smart and excellent communicator DBA, who often share the screen with businesses to show them that in spite of querying more rows of data, issue cannot be reproduced and query executes in fraction of eye blink,in such cases ensure that we use same set of data which is used in application during the time you saw slowness along with before and after row count for the table and also all condition remains the same.)

Moving on, once you are able to replicate the issue, the next step is to identify the Query plan generated by the query,in MySQL server, this can done  by using Explain Statement,

MySQL> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE auto_id = 46102
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: MYTABLE
         type: ALL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
      key_len: NULL
          ref: NULL
         rows: 47890
        Extra: Using where
 

In above query execution plan,any query that do not use an index signified by the key row above in the preceding output can be considered a poorly tuned SQL query. The number of rows read in evaluating this SQL statement,is as signified by the rows row,gives some indication to as how much data is read and can directly correlate to the amount of time required to execute the query. The type row with a value of ALL is also an indicator of a problem.

Adding the indexes to the table might help in these cases,but again it also depends a lot on the structure of the table, so before applying any fix to the situation, it makes more sense to understand the table structure and amount of the data the table holds,

Below command will give you the information about table structure,

SHOW CREATE TABLE ‘MYTABLE’ ;

The above statement will provide you the information about the table along with all column information.Once we understand the structure of the table it becomes quite easy to apply and try out various fixes.Below command will give you information about data length and other various table information

SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'MYTABLE'

Both the above commands gives us very interesting information and this information can help in doing sizing of the databases along with capacity planning.

Once we have all these information, we can start working on applying fixes.Maybe after I fix some of my tables, I can write some more interesting things to do.

 

 

 
 

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