Finding A Test Seam

test driven development, software development

Testing legacy code is tough. It was never designed for tests. The app uses EJBs including old fashioned entity beans. After spending some time trying to get a few tests written against a stateless session bean using MockEJB, I hit upon a new idea. Maybe I want to test at the Business Delegate layer and just mock the calls to the stateless session bean.

With a little dash of EasyMock and a bonus setter method to inject the stateless session bean I now can start opening up a seam for future tests. I’d still like to test the EJB layers, but now I have a seam in the application to work from. (Kudos to Michael Feathers for naming the technique)

Ed Gibbs @ July 22, 2007