Key Software Factory Tools in the Java World

Here are some popular free and/or freemium tools for creating a software factory for a Java project :

• Issue Tracking
  • Bugzilla
  • Mantis
• Quality Tracking Servers
  • SonarQube
  • Squale
• Source control
  • SVN
  • Git
  • Mercurial
• Continuous Integration
  • Jenkins
  • Gitlab CI
  • Cruise Control
• Quality tracking facilitators
  • Jacoco – the only Java code coverage tool I know of that doesn’t require instrumented recompilation before running tests
  • Static analysis tools (often already integrated with SonarQube)
    • FindBugs
    • PMD
    • CheckStyle
• Build
  • Ant (with Ivy)
  • Maven
  • Gradle

I’ve written about these build tools before.

Here’s a chart showing the relative popularity of these 3 tools.

• Automated test suites
  • JUnit
  • TestNG

• Unit test facilitators
  • Mockito (one of many tools for mocking out dependencies to isolate the unit under test, but it’s the one I recommend and have presented in detail in this blog)
  • AssertJ (fluent assertions)
  • Zohhak (parameterized tests with friendly annotation syntax)
  • System Rules (for handling console i/o in unit tests)

There are many more unit test facilitators available for free, and I’ve developed some lesser-known open-source unit test facilitators myself.

• Integration test facilitators
  • Arquillian – allows you to run a test on a Java EE server (either a remote server or one configured and launched by your test code)
  • OpenEJB – a lightweight EJB framework implementation that can be launched in a test
  • DBUnit – set up and clean up after tests that use real database connections
  • Docker – actually, Docker is a facilitator for just about any sort of automation you want to do, but I put it in the integration test category because it allows you to spin up a database or other server from a test.

Note: do not mix the Arquillian and OpenEJB together in the same test suite – jar conflicts can ensue when tests are run manually in Eclipse

• End-to-end (functional) test facilitators
  • Selenium
  • Windowlicker (a swing-UI validator used in GOOS, apparently no longer maintained)
  • Swtbot

There are surely other tools I’ve left out.  Feel free to mention your favorites in the comments.

• Tools