Writing a single unit test for multiple implementations of an interface

I have an interface List whose implementations include Singly Linked List, Doubly, Circular etc. The unit tests I wrote for Singly should do good for most of Doubly as well as Circular and any other new implementation of the interface. So instead of repeating the unit tests for every implementation, does JUnit offer something inbuilt which would let me have one JUnit test and run it against different implementations?

Using JUnit parameterized tests I can supply different implementations like Singly, doubly, circular etc but for each implementation the same object is used to execute all the tests in the class.


I'd probably avoid JUnit's parameterized tests (which IMHO are pretty clumsily implemented), and just make an abstract List test class which could be inherited by tests implementations:

public abstract class ListTestBase<T extends List> {

    private T instance;

    protected abstract T createInstance();

    @Before 
    public void setUp() {
        instance = createInstance();
    }

    @Test
    public void testOneThing(){ /* ... */ }

    @Test
    public void testAnotherThing(){ /* ... */ }

}

The different implementations then get their own concrete classes:

class SinglyLinkedListTest extends ListTestBase<SinglyLinkedList> {

    @Override
    protected SinglyLinkedList createInstance(){ 
        return new SinglyLinkedList(); 
    }

}

class DoublyLinkedListTest extends ListTestBase<DoublyLinkedList> {

    @Override
    protected DoublyLinkedList createInstance(){ 
        return new DoublyLinkedList(); 
    }

}

The nice thing about doing it this way (instead of making one test class which tests all implementations) is that if there are some specific corner cases you'd like to test with one implementation, you can just add more tests to the specific test subclass.


With JUnit 4.0+ you can use parameterized tests:

  • Add @RunWith(value = Parameterized.class) annotation to your test fixture
  • Create a public static method returning Collection, annotate it with @Parameters, and put SinglyLinkedList.class, DoublyLinkedList.class, CircularList.class, etc. into that collection
  • Add a constructor to your test fixture that takes Class: public MyListTest(Class cl), and store the Class in an instance variable listClass
  • In the setUp method or @Before, use List testList = (List)listClass.newInstance();

With the above setup in place, the parameterized runner will make a new instance of your test fixture MyListTest for each subclass that you provide in the @Parameters method, letting you exercise the same test logic for every subclass that you need to test.