Drools testing with junit

Personally I use unit tests to test isolated rules. I don't think there is anything too wrong with it, as long as you don't fall into a false sense of security that your knowledge base is working because isolated rules are working. Testing the entire knowledge base is more important.

You can write the isolating tests with AgendaFilter and StatelessSession

StatelessSession session = ruleBase.newStatelessSesssion();

session.setAgendaFilter( new RuleNameMatches("<regexp to your rule name here>") );

List data = new ArrayList();
... // create your test data here (probably built from some external file)

StatelessSessionResult result == session.executeWithResults( data );

// check your results here.

Code source: http://blog.athico.com/2007/07/my-rules-dont-work-as-expected-what-can.html

Do not attempt to limit rule execution to a single rule for a test. Unlike OO classes, single rules are not independent of other rules, so it does not make sense to test a rule in isolation in the same way that you would test a single class using a unit test. In other words, to test a single rule, test that it has the right effect in combination with the other rules.

Instead, run tests with a small amount of data on all of your rules, i.e. with a minimal number of facts in the rule session, and test the results and perhaps that a particular rule was fired. The result is not actually that much different from what you have in mind, because a minimal set of test data might only activate one or two rules.

As for the sample data, I prefer to use static data and define minimal test data for each test. There are various ways of doing this, but programmatically creating fact objects in Java might be good enough.