A few months ago, I presented interface-it, a java-8 tool to generate mixin interfaces. In case you don’t know what that means or why mixins could be useful to you, I wrote a short article which explains it.

One of the key motivations for the interface-it tool was to be able to generate mixins for the latest versions of unit-testing libraries like Mockito and AssertJ. Now you no longer have to worry about that, because I’m doing it for you. And more.

I now have several more projects to present to you.

Presenting tdd-mixins-junit4

Working backwards – if you want to have a great test fixture by adding only one dependency in your build configuration (your Maven Pom, Ivy xml, Gradle, or just a fat jar added to your classpath), use tdd-mixins-junit4. It gives you all the basics you need to do mocking and assertions with fluidity, simplicity and power.

Normally, that’s all you should need for your tests. Mockito allows you to to set up collaborating objects and verify behavior, and the extensions I added make it even easier to handle cases where, for example, you want to mock behavior based on arguments passed to the mock which are generated by your unit under test. As for verifying returned results, AssertJ and JUnit assertions allow you to verify any data returned by the unit under test.

Presenting tdd-mixins-core

If you do not want to use JUnit 4 (maybe you want to use TestNG or an early version of JUnit 5), then you can use tdd-mixins-core, which has everything that tdd-mixins-junit4 has, except the mixin for JUnit assertions and JUnit itself.

Presenting extended-mockito

So these tdd-mixins libraries notably give you mixins for the aforementioned libraries Mockito and AssertJ. As for Mockito, they use my extended-mockito (TODO: link to project) library, which not only provides mixins for classes like Mockito and BDDMockito, but it also provides extra matcher methods to simplify specifying matching arguments for mocked methods. For example:

when(myMockSpamFilter.isSpam(containsOneOrMoreOf("Viagra", "Cialis", "Payday loan"))) .thenReturn(Boolean.TRUE);

See the project’s home page or the unit tests for more details.

Presenting template-example

As for AssertJ, it’s already quite extended for general purpose use, so there is no extended-assertj project, but if you want to take things farther, I did create a project called template-example, which shows how, with a little tweaking, you can use a Maven plugin to auto-generate custom assertions for your own JavaBeans which are combined with the AssertJ mixin from tdd-mixins-core. These custom assertions allow you to do smooth, fluent assertions for your own data types, allowing this sort of validation call:

assertThat(employee).employer().address().postalCode().startsWith("11");

With these tools, you can more productively write unit tests with powerful assertions and mocking. They give you a fixture that you can set up in any test class by implementing an interface or two – for example:

public class MyTest implements ExtendedMockito, AllAssertions {

Not Included

What’s missing from these tools? I wanted to keep the toolset light, so there are some excellent but more specialized tools which are not included. For example, I have generated a mixin for Jsoup, which is very useful if you need to validate generated HTML, but unless I hear a clamoring for it, I will leave it out of tdd-mixins-core because it adds a dependency that lots of people may not need. Same for extensions to AssertJ – I generated mixins for AssertJ-DB and for AssertJGuava (UPDATE: also added one for Awaitility), but did not include them in tdd-mixins (you can copy and paste the generated mixins’ source files if you want to use them).

Another library which is useful but which does not lend itself to mixins (because it uses annotations rather than static calls) is Zohhak – it simplifies testing methods which return results that depend on a wide variety of possible input values (such as mathematical calculations or business rules).