How to use JUnit to test asynchronous processes

Question

How do you test methods that fire asynchronous processes with JUnit?

I don\'t know how to make my test wait for the process to end (it is not exactly a unit test, it

Answer 1

One method I've found pretty useful for testing asynchronous methods is injecting an Executor instance in the object-to-test's constructor. In production, the executor instance is configured to run asynchronously while in test it can be mocked to run synchronously.

So suppose I'm trying to test the asynchronous method Foo#doAsync(Callback c),

class Foo {
  private final Executor executor;
  public Foo(Executor executor) {
    this.executor = executor;
  }

  public void doAsync(Callback c) {
    executor.execute(new Runnable() {
      @Override public void run() {
        // Do stuff here
        c.onComplete(data);
      }
    });
  }
}

In production, I would construct Foo with an Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor() Executor instance while in test I would probably construct it with a synchronous executor that does the following --

class SynchronousExecutor implements Executor {
  @Override public void execute(Runnable r) {
    r.run();
  }
}

Now my JUnit test of the asynchronous method is pretty clean --

@Test public void testDoAsync() {
  Executor executor = new SynchronousExecutor();
  Foo objectToTest = new Foo(executor);

  Callback callback = mock(Callback.class);
  objectToTest.doAsync(callback);

  // Verify that Callback#onComplete was called using Mockito.
  verify(callback).onComplete(any(Data.class));

  // Assert that we got back the data that we expected.
  assertEquals(expectedData, callback.getData());
}