"unit testing" entries
Unit Testing Java 8 Lambda Expressions and Streams
Two approaches to testing lambdafied code.
Over the past 18 months or so I’ve been talking to a lot of people about lambda expressions in Java 8. This isn’t that unusual when you’ve written a book on Java 8 and also run a training course on the topic! One of the questions I often get asked by people is how do lambda expressions alter how they test code? It’s an increasingly pertinent question in a world where more and more people have some kind of automated unit or regression test suite that runs over their project and when many people do Test Driven Development. Let’s explore some of the problems you may encounter when testing code that uses lambdas and streams and how to solve them.
Usually, when writing a unit test you call a method in your test code that gets called in your application. Given some inputs and possibly test doubles, you call these methods to test a certain behavior happening and then specify the changes you expect to result from this behavior.
Lambda expressions pose a slightly different challenge when unit testing code. Because they don’t have a name, it’s impossible to directly call them in your test code. You could choose to copy the body of the lambda expression into your test and then test that copy, but this approach has the unfortunate side effect of not actually testing the behavior of your implementation. If you change the implementation code, your test will still pass even though the implementation is performing a different task.