A Test-Driven Development Stack for Java: Maven, Jetty, Mockito, and JAX-RS

“A colleague of mine told me a story that exemplifies the common
attitude of non-technical personnel toward unit testing. He had
done a presentation on test-driven development (TDD) for a new team
he joined. Afterwards, the project manager gathered all the other
developers in a separate room and told them flat out: “We do not
have time to write unit tests, so just disregard everything he
said.”

“Unfortunately, all too often this is the short-sighted attitude
that developers face. From my own experience, every project where
unit testing was not a priority has usually ended in delays and
missed deadlines. Worst of all, every single major change to the
system (which is inevitable) would bring up the spectre of breaking
some existing functionality. Sooner or later, this would blow up
during manual testing and send the whole team into a chaotic frenzy
of last-minute patches, which led to an even more unstable system
down the road.

“Implementing TDD from the Start

“Many believe TDD is expensive, but that is true only if your
system was designed without any regard for either unit testing or
the system’s long-term maintenance costs. On a recent project, my
team took those two issues into account right from the beginning by
ensuring that all of our functionality was easily testable and by
choosing the right tools (Maven and Jetty) to facilitate TDD for
server-side applications.”

Complete Story