About Dustin Marx
In my last post, I wrote about hints provided in NetBeans 7.4 beta that improve a developer’s ability to avoid nasty runtime issues with Java exception handling. In this post, I look at how two more hints provided by NetBeans 7.4 beta can be used to make unit tests more correct and more clear during unit test execution. These are the “Inconvertible parameters of Assert.assertEquals” and “Incorrect order of parameters of Assert.assertEquals” hints.
As far as I can tell from anecdotal evidence and from talking to other Java developers, JUnit remains the most widely used unit testing framework in the Java environment. Most of these JUnit users are intimately familiar with JUnit’s Assert class and its many overloaded assertEquals methods. NetBeans 7.4 beta now provides two hints to make it easier to use these assertEquals methods appropriately.
Although many of the Assert.assertEquals() methods have very specific data types for the “expected” and “actual” parameters to be asserted as equal, there is a version that accepts two Objects and this means two parameters of different types that cannot possibly be considered “equal” can still be passed to that method. There is no way for the compiler to prevent that, but NetBeans 7.4 beta includes the “Inconvertible parameters of Assert.assertEquals” hint to address that particular case. Without such a hint, one is more likely to not realize the error of his or her ways until he or she runs the JUnit test and sees the failed assertion.
Source : http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2013/09/better-junit-based-unit-tests-with-netbeans-7-4-beta-hints.html
