Oracle Unit Testing with utPLSQL

Oracle Unit Testing with
utPLSQL
Brendan Furey, October 2015
http://aprogrammerwrites.eu/

Agenda
Manual vs Automated Unit Testing, and Agile (6 slides)
utPLSQL vs Gherkin (2 slides)
Working with utPLSQL (5 slides)
utPLSQL Examples (2 slides)
Oracle Unit Testing with utPLSQL 2Brendan Furey, 2015

Manual vs Automated Unit Testing
Unit testing on database is mostly manual up to now
utPLSQL inspired by xUnit testing
Automated unit testing on the database has additional challenges compared
with Java unit testing for example
Database developers express concerns about cost of automation
Creator of utPLSQL admits he does not use it himself
Checklist Driven Development: TDD on the cheap
 "Doing full-blown test driven development (TDD) simply is not going to happen
widely in the Oracle database programming world."

Cost of Automated Testing

Agile Changes the Equation
Agile and TDD with ideas of smaller, more frequent changes
Manual testing now too expensive
Automation therefore required
Overall cost may be smaller with automation
Continuous Integration / Delivery changes everything!
utPLSQL was ahead of its time initially (c.15 years ago)

Example: Feature Cloning with Manual Testing
New feature similar to an existing one (second version of web service maybe)
Manual regression testing too costly, so refactoring rarely happens
Copy and modify, end up with code duplication, larger code base
Code becomes larger and less modular as time passes
FDD - Fear Driven Development

Example: Feature Cloning with Automated Testing
 Refactor to reduce new code base, and re-use base and unit test code
 Automated regression testing gives confidence to refactor safely
 Code is continuously refined and improved
 Less technical debt

Testing Cycle: Pattern vs Antipattern
Diagrams from software testing ice-cream cone
Pyramid Ideal Pattern
• Consider testing approaches with these in mind
Icecream Cone Antipattern

utPLSQL vs Gherkin 1: Gherkin
 Some support for Cucumber and other Gherkin methods, but some
opposition too:
 Please don't use Cucumber
 TDD: Where Did It All Go Wrong?
 Driving motivation may be, as Ian Cooper suggests, due to poor
understanding of TDD
 Notably, focusing on implementation details, not behaviours
 Defining all tests up front with QA, less iterative
 Going out to Java problematic
 May not be very agile?
 Acceptance testing is generally less rigorous than good unit testing

utPLSQL vs Gherkin 2: utPLSQL
 Processing in base code is of same nature as that of unit testing
code, hence well-suited to database language PL/SQL
 Developer can start with a single test
 Make it work
 Add additional tests and make them work iteratively
 Tests are exclusively behavioural, eliminating need for repeated unit
testing up the pyramid
 More of a TDD approach
 QA will focus on integration tests and avoid unit testing
 Currently QA tend to do unit testing after developers have done theirs
 Symptom of icecream cone antipattern
 QA will validate the development unit tests

Working with utPLSQL 1: Home Page
utPLSQL Home Page
Steve Feuerstein's Recommendations for unit testing PL/SQL
programs
"utPLSQL is free and gives you total control over your test
code. But that's mostly because you have to write all the test
code"
"If you are allergic to UI-based testing and/or worry about
being constrained by an IDE's feature set (in other words, you
are a command line fanatic), utPLSQL offers a powerful
alternative."

Working with utPLSQL 2: Structure
 CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE ut_package IS
 PROCEDURE ut_setup;
 PROCEDURE ut_teardown;

 PROCEDURE ut_proc;
 END ut_package;
 Think in design patterns
 One web service procedure may be based on the code for an earlier one
 Use similar coding strategies
 Generic array types can help here
 Modularise just as with base code
 Behaviours only tested, no implementation tests
 Large set of ‘assert’ procedures: may be simpler to just cast to strings and assert string
equality

Working with utPLSQL 3: Improving the Output
Output format not great, but use a wrapper assert procedure
 Can group tests by category such as normal/edge/exception etc.
 Tabular output of expected vs actuals
 Count tests and failures by group
Also summarise by suite
Unit tests succeed or fail, but:
 Can add useful information, such as code timings (I have small
footprint code timer)
 May help to diagnose a sudden performance problem

Working with utPLSQL 4: Coding Strategies 1 – data
structures etc.
Drive by data structures rather than case by case in program
logic
Use arrays for test data setup, for calling parameters and for
expected results
Use arrays to store meaningful test descriptions
Concatenate fields in a record to reduce number of assertions
Use utility procedures to transform a range to a range category
for assertion, eg NOW = 'in last ten minutes', PAST = 'earlier
than 10 minutes ago'
Use generic arrays rather than creating new record or object
types for each test case

Working with utPLSQL 5: Coding Strategies 2 - DML
Use special DML APIs for the test data
Parametrise important fields
Use dummy values for other mandatory fields for
simplicity to avoid passing parameters; maybe index-
suffix them
Ignore non-mandatory fields that don't figure in the
testing
May be best to keep simple, and avoid over-sharing

utPLSQL Example 1: Simple Table API
API to merge reference data into a table
Runs via suite (although only 1 test set in suite)

utPLSQL Example 2: Web Service Procedure with
Batch Denormalisation
 Batch job runs to pre-populate a table for performance reasons
 Test records for each type of driving entity
 Test each outer-join by including record with missing join
 Check output table record values
 Check output table record counts for the input test set
 Web service procedure reads the table and outputs a reference
cursor
 Input is an array of records
 Array of input arrays for all combinations of inputs
 Test program calls procedure for each input, then reads the output cursor into
an array
 Again test counts and record values against expected value arrays

Oracle Unit Testing with utPLSQL

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