Testing
Three frameworks dominate the Java BDD landscape: Cucumber-JVM, JBehave, and Serenity BDD. All three let you write acceptance tests in a business-readable format and map them to Java glue code. Beyond that surface similarity, they make very different trade-offs. Picking the wrong one costs you months of
Testing
Cucumber-JVM brings Behaviour-Driven Development to the JVM. Combined with Spring Boot, it gives you executable specifications that run against a real (or sliced) application context. This guide covers everything from zero to a working BDD suite: dependency setup, Spring integration, writing your first feature file, defining steps, and
Testing
A Cucumber suite that takes 20 minutes to run is a suite developers skip. Parallel execution cuts that time proportionally to the number of available cores — a suite that ran sequentially in 20 minutes can finish in 4 minutes on a 6-core machine. But parallelism also exposes shared state
Testing
Cucumber-JVM scenarios often span multiple step definition classes. A login step puts a session token somewhere. A checkout step needs that token. A verification step needs the order ID that checkout returned. Without a deliberate state-sharing strategy, you end up with static fields, thread-local hacks, or a
Testing
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a way of writing tests that describes system behavior in plain language that both technical and non-technical team members can read and understand. Cucumber is the most widely-used tool for this in the Java ecosystem — it runs tests written in Gherkin syntax (Given/
Testing
Mockito is the default choice for mocking in Java tests. It's clean, composable, and integrates naturally with JUnit 5. Most of the time, it's all you need. But Mockito has hard limits — it cannot mock static methods (without extensions), final classes, constructors, or private methods. That&
Testing
Static methods are the hardest thing to mock in Java. They're called directly on the class, not on an injected instance, so standard mocking frameworks — which work by creating proxy subclasses — can't intercept them. That's why two separate solutions exist: PowerMock's mockStatic(
Testing
PowerMock exists because Mockito has hard limits. Mockito cannot mock constructors, cannot intercept new calls inside a method under test, and cannot directly invoke private methods for assertion. PowerMock lifts those limits by bytecode-manipulating your classes at test time. That power comes with real costs — complexity, classloader isolation, slow
Cadence
Cadence is Uber's open-source workflow engine—the direct predecessor to Temporal. While many teams have migrated to Temporal, Cadence remains widely deployed at scale, and understanding its testing patterns is valuable both for maintaining Cadence codebases and for teams evaluating the migration path to Temporal. This guide
Testing
PITest (PIT) is the dominant mutation testing framework for JVM languages. While most documentation targets Maven/Java setups, PITest works equally well with Gradle and Kotlin — with a few configuration differences worth knowing about. This guide covers the complete Gradle setup, Kotlin-specific behavior, and how to get meaningful results
Java
async-profiler is a low-overhead sampling profiler for JVM applications that generates flame graphs showing where CPU time is spent. YourKit is a commercial profiler with deeper analysis. This guide covers attaching both profilers to running JVM processes, reading flame graphs, finding memory leaks, and profiling in production environments.
API Testing
If you write Java and need to test REST APIs, REST Assured is the most popular library for the job. It lets you write readable, expressive HTTP tests that fit naturally into a JUnit or TestNG test suite. This tutorial walks you through everything from initial setup to writing your