Functional/regression testing for Java Applications working with files

Question

I'm trying to find the best way to create automated testing for functional/acceptance/regression testing for some java applications. All the applications work in this way:

1. They read a File from a given folder
2. They write a new file in another format with the content of the input file.
3. They send to database some of the information of processed files.
4. They wait until a new file is left in the input folder.

This is a cyclic application, it never stops.

New files/formats are added continuously and several of our libraries are shared by all the formats. Manual testing is taking more and more cost with each new format. All the files are plain text files but with different format in the way data is saved.

We need a way/tool that could help us to automated the functional/acceptance/regression tests (specially QA tests).

The question is: What tool/way of testing can be used for this?

I was thinking in something that can left files in the input folder and compare what the application creates in output folder with an expected file. I don´t know if this can be done easily with a tool or if we have to make all of this entirely.

Answer 1

I would use a generic functional test automation framework and use a set of libraries to read/parse/compare files. I am familiar with Robot Framework and there are some Python Libraries to read/compare files (some embedded in Robot itself, some elsewhere). That is very convenient and quite easy to use for QA Tests. Check out the demo project for a good start.

If you prefer to stick in the Java ecosystem, you might want to try Cucumber-jvm or JBehave.