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JMockit 0.998 has been added to the project to provide a mocking framework to the tests.

ContiPerf

ContiPerf is a lightweight testing utility that enables the user to easily leverage JUnit 4 test cases as performance tests e.g. for continuous performance testing.

The project makes use of ContiPerf 1.06.

Unit Tests Implementation

These are tests which test just how one object works. Typically test each method on an object for expected output in several situations. They are executed exclusively at the API level.

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These tests work at the API level and test the interaction of components within the system. Some examples, placing an item into a collection, or creating a new metadata schema and adding some fields. Primarily these tests operate at the API level ignoring the interface components above it.

Integration tests use the same structure as Unit tests. A class has been created, called AbstractIntegrationTest, that inherits from AbstractUnitTest. This provides the integration tests with the same temporal file system and in-memory database as the unit tests. The class AbstractIntegrationTest is created just in case we may need some extra scaffolding for these tests. All integration tests should inherit from it to both distinguish themselves from unit tests and in case we require specific changes for them.

The main difference between these and the unit tests is in the test implemented, not in the infrastructure required, as these tests will use several classes at once to emulate a user action.

The main difference between these and the unit tests is in the test implemented, not in the infrastructure required, as these tests will use several classes at once to emulate a user action.

The integration tests also make use of ContiPerf to evaluate the performance of the system. We believe it doesn't make sense to add this layer to the unit tests, as they are tested in isolation and we care about performance not on individual calls but on certain tasks that can only be emulated by integration testing.

Structure

Integration tests use the same structure as Unit tests. A class has been created, called AbstractIntegrationTest, that inherits from AbstractUnitTest. This provides the integration tests with the same temporal file system and in-memory database as the unit tests. The class AbstractIntegrationTest is created just in case we may need some extra scaffolding for these tests. All integration tests should inherit from it to both distinguish themselves from unit tests and in case we require specific changes for them.

Classes that contain teh code for Integration Tests are named <class>IntegrationTest.java.

Issues

We have detected an issue with the integration tests, related to the Context class. In this class, the List of events was implemented as an ArrayList<Event>. The issue here is that ArrayList is not a safe class for concurrency. Although this would not be a problem while running the application in a JEE container, as there will be a unique thread per request (at least in normal conditions), we can't be sure of the kind of calls users may do to the API while extending DSpace.

To avoid the issue we have to wrap the List into a synchronized stated via Collections.synchronizedList . This, along a synchronized block, will ensure the code behaves as expected.

We have detected the following classes affected by this behavior:

• BasicDispatcher.java

In fact any class that calls Context.getEvents() may be affected by this. A comment has been added in the javadoc of this class (alongside a TODO tag) to warn about the issue.The integration tests also make use of ContiPerf to evaluate the performance of the system. We believe it doesn't make sense to add this layer to the unit tests, as they are tested in isolation and we expect performance not of individual calls but of certain tasks that can only be emulated by integration testing. 

Static Analysis

Due to comments in the GSoC meetings, some static analysis tools have been added to the project. The tools are just a complement, a platform like Sonar should be used as it integrates better with the structure of DSpace and we could have the reports linked to Jira.

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