FAQ

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TLDR: Learn Java by taking advantage of code completion and JavaDoc in the IDE to explore classes with JUnit Tests

I my book Java For Testers I encourage the reader to experiment when learning Java by writing small JUnit tests to explore classes. I’m going to expand on that concept in this blog post and the associated video.

TLDR; Testability is for humans. Automatability (Automatizability) is for applications.

Resources are a very useful concept in Java. They are essentially files in the project which are compiled into the .jar

Java also has commands for finding them .getResource and reading them .getResourceAsStream

Very Handy.

But, they can be hard to wrap your head around. As evidenced by my own experiences trying to use them and the number of queries on stack overflow.

TLDR; Regression Testing is a Legacy term for testing when a risk of unexpected impact exists after making changes.

TL;DR Java 1.9 does not like reflection as much as previous versions and access to proprietary packages is not possible out of the box.

Java 1.9 is out, and many companies now will be evaluating Java 1.9 and migrating their code base over to Java 1.9. I am now going through a similar process.

I have some fairly simple code that I was using for HTTP requests. This was originally written in Java 1.8 and to keep my codebase as simple as possible and I wanted to use no external libraries, therefore for HTTP requests I used an HttpURLConnection.

This started to fail on Java 1.9.

When I looked in my code more carefully I realised that it wasn’t HttpURLConnection that was failing in Java 1.9 it was my use of Reflection to bypass some constraints of the HttpUrlConnection that was failing.

TLDR; check that you haven’t redeclared a field as a variable in a setup method

FAQ - why does my code throw a null pointer exception - common reason #1 Redeclaration

• Using @BeforeClass or @Before can setup data for use in tests
• Any ‘variables’ we instantiate need to be ‘fields’ rather than variables
• We want to instantiate them in the setup method rather than redeclare them

TLDR; There are a lot of amazing YouTube channels to learn from. If you’re not using subscriptions on YouTube with notifications or RSS then you are missing out.

Since I do receive this question via email quite a lot, I will answer it as an FAQ.