Design Patterns for High-Quality Automated Tests
Java Edition
Clean Code for Bulletproof Tests
Anton Angelov
Automate The Planet
Table of Contents
Credits
Copyright @ 2021 Automate The Planet
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First published: March 2021
Production reference: Published by Automate The Planet Ltd.
Address: https://www.automatetheplanet.com/
Book cover design and formatting by Martin Kolev
About the Author
Anton Angelov is CTO and Co-founder of Automate The Planet Ltd, inventor of BELLATRIX Test Automation Framework. Nowadays, he directs a team of passionate engineers helping companies succeed with their test automation. Additionally, he consults companies, leads automated testing training series in C# and Java, writes books, and gives conference talks.
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About the Reviewers
Nikolay Avramov is a Senior Developer in Test and Team Lead at Automate The Planet. For the past 8 years, he worked as a Quality Assurance Engineer in Telerik (later acquired by Progress software). He started his career in the field from ground zero- from taking part of the Telerik Academy to becoming a Principal QA Engineer/Ninja that is in the heart of any innovation or automation initiative. Through his work he has developed, and integrated multiple custom frameworks and tools used across the entire company. To name a few- a custom Load and Performance Testing Framework; System Testing Framework; Web Service Testing Framework; Visual Verification Framework; and many other productivity tools that assured the highest quality of all web and business assets of the company. He found his true passion in Automation while looking for a weapon to fight the boring, non-productive daily tasks that a QA faces. By reducing the manual repeatable jobs, he believes that we can make the world a better place, full of happy and productive people that are ready to tackle the next challenging task, instead of the next pile of test scenarios to cover by hand. He is a passionate technology geek and automation specialist that strives to implement optimizations and achieve high-quality standards in any aspect of life.
A few words for the book:
The book will pretty much give you the building blocks you need and will take you through the natural process of building a fully fletched test automation framework within a few hours read.
The beginning and the end of the book shows the difference between the rookie QA enthusiast and the automation ninja. This knowledge will give you the power to make educated decisions for common problems in test automation and will give you the right arguments to defend them in front of any manager or developer.
Acknowledgements
The content of the book is a result of the accumulated knowledge of many great engineers and IT professionals. Many good programmers tend to be very egocentric, believing that they are always right and know everything. Often, they forget how they got their knowledge. It is a result not only of our efforts but a mixture of personal effort/work, luck, living, and working environment. I believe that in this phase of my life, I know enough "tips and tricks" so that I can write a book. However, this wouldn't be possible without the help of all the people that took some part of my life. The example and hard work of my parents, high school, and university teachers. Later, the many mentors and colleagues I had in the past companies I worked for. I am a person who is a natural learner and regularly reads new books and watches video courses/lectures. I wouldn't be as good as I am now without the valuable information in these materials.
As some of you know, for the past several years, I am regularly writing articles on my website- Automate The Planet. The book accumulates a big part of the knowledge I tried to share during the years. But the site wouldn't be what it is without your support! So, I would like to say, "Thank You!" to all fans and readers. The same is valid for all the talks I gave to many international DEV and QA conferences. Thank you for being there, hearing and trying to apply the ideas I talk about.
Most importantly, I want to say BIG THANK YOU to my colleague Nikolay Avramov for agreeing to help me with the technical and editorial tasks.
Without his help and support, the quality of the book wouldn't be the same!
My partner in crime at Automate The Planet Martin Kolev is responsible for all visual enhancements, the marketing, and many other tedious tasks around the project.
Thanks to all my friends that were there for me and hearing me talking geek stuff about the book.
Foreword
Since I usually skip the Foreword chapters of other books, I will try to be short. My core belief is that to achieve high-quality test automation that brings value- you need to understand core programming concepts such as SOLID and the usage of design patterns. After you master them, the usual career transition is into more architecture roles, such as choosing the best possible approaches for solving particular test automation challenges. This is the essence of the book. No more Hello world examples but some serious literature about test automation practices!
P.S. After the first book's success, Design Patterns for High-Quality Automated Tests C# Edition, many people asked me when there will be a version for Java. This is why I started refreshing my Java knowledge and started writing. One year later, the book is here. More or less, the book explains the same concepts, but all code examples and specifics target the Java world. If you have read the C# edition, you can skip some of the more theoretical chapters or recheck them for a refresher.
You may notice that I have changed the sub-title for those of you who have purchased the C# version. I believe that the new sub-title communicates much better the ideas of the book. I won't bother you with lengthy introductions and discussions about what clean code means. There are whole books about the subject. But if I had to summarize what clean code means in one sentence, I would say: " Clean code is code that is easy to understand and easy to change ." Easy to understand means the code is easy to read, whether that reader is the original author of the code or somebody else. Its meaning is clear, so it minimizes the need for guesswork and the possibility of misunderstandings. It is easy to understand on every level. Easy to change means the code is easy to extend and refactor, and it's easy to fix bugs in the codebase. This can be achieved if the person making the changes understands the code and feels confident that the code changes do not break any existing functionality. I will end the intro with two quotes by two famous authors Robert C. Martin and Michael Feathers. [ Wcc 14 ]
