Daniel John Debrunner wrote:
What's the benefit of running unit tests against jar files? For
functional tests I see the benefit, it is testing the user api using
artifacts the user is expected to have on the classpath. However for
unit tests I can't see what bugs would be found by testing against
classes that are in a "fake" jar (assuming the unit tests are run
against classes as well).
Actually, I can not see a really big difference on running unit tests
and function tests. The errors discovered by unit test may not appear
during a run of functional tests since the functional tests do not cover
each and every situation it may happen during an execution. However this
errors might show up to a user after some time or in a special case/deploy.
So I see b) and c) as being the same really, manufacturing some fake
jar (and for b it's more than derby.jar, may want to unit test network
code for example) for no benefit. As an alternative I think the unit
testing could easily be setup as a optional step in the build process.
There could be an additional target in top level build.xml file that
ran the unit tests against the classes and those that wanted could
include it in their build process (e.g. a target all_with_unit_tests).
Yes, this might be a sufficient solution.
Julo
