Research & Evidence-Based Practice Flashcards

Which Spring testing annotation loads a full application context while allowing bean override for isolated integration tests?

Answer: @SpringBootTest

@SpringBootTest loads the complete application context and supports bean overrides via @MockBean or @SpyBean for controlled integration testing.

When benchmarking a Spring Boot REST endpoint, which tool is most commonly recommended in the Spring community for HTTP load testing?

Answer: Gatling or JMeter

Gatling and JMeter are the evidence-based choices for HTTP load testing Spring REST endpoints, providing throughput and latency metrics.

What does the Spring Framework's official documentation recommend as the primary source of truth for verifying bean lifecycle behavior?

Answer: Spring reference docs and Javadoc

The Spring reference documentation and official Javadoc are the authoritative, evidence-based sources for understanding bean lifecycle guarantees.

Which Spring project provides the Micrometer integration that enables evidence-based performance monitoring through metrics collection?

Answer: Spring Boot Actuator

Spring Boot Actuator integrates Micrometer to expose metrics endpoints, enabling data-driven performance monitoring and observability.

A developer wants to isolate only the JPA layer during testing. Which slice test annotation does Spring Boot provide for this?

Answer: @DataJpaTest

@DataJpaTest configures only JPA-related beans and an in-memory database, providing a focused, evidence-based slice test for the persistence layer.

Which approach does Spring's own test documentation recommend for verifying that a @Transactional method rolls back correctly in tests?

Answer: Rely on default @Transactional test rollback behavior

By default, Spring's TestContext Framework rolls back transactions after each test method, which is the recommended approach for verifying transactional behavior without polluting the database.

What is the evidence-based best practice when interpreting JVM warm-up effects in Spring application startup benchmarks?

Answer: Discard early iterations and average steady-state results

JVM JIT compilation skews early runs, so benchmarks should discard warm-up iterations and report steady-state averages for accurate Spring application performance data.