Introducing a (new) test method to a team

The easiest metric is to ask, "when was the last time this integration test legitimately failed?" If it has been a long time (there have been a lot of changes) since the integration test failed, then the unit tests are probably doing a good enough job. If the integration test has failed recently, then there was a defect that was not caught by the unit tests.

My preference would generally be to increase the robustness of the integration tests, to the point where they can be reliably run unattended. If they take a long time to run, then run them overnight. They are still valuable even if they are only run occasionally. If these tests are too fragile or require manual intervention, then it may not be worth the time spent in keeping them running, and you may consider discarding those that succeed most often.

While unit testing you are not expected to test with a database, or at least, not with a database you haven't prepared for unit testing. Testing with a database, and as such, testing different layers of your application at the same time is generally seen as integration tests. With unit tests you are supposed to test only what your method does, what it returns depending on different parameters, and when (or not) it should fail.

It is very much expected that in your method you make calls to X methods from other classes. You are not testing these X methods so what you have to do is to mock these methods.

I suppose you're writing your code in Java, in that case you have great mocking frameworks such as Mockito which may be helpful to you. Whether or not you use a mocking framework is your choice, I'll just say they'll save you a lot of time and the one I mentioned at least is really not complicated.

If you just want to write your own mock to experiment, then suppose you have the following CustomerRepository class:

public class CustomerRepository {
 public CustomerDTO getCustomer(int id) {
   ...
 }
}

You can write your own mocked and dirty CustomerRepository class the following way:

public class MockedCustomerRepository extends CustomerRepository {
 public boolean bThrowDatabaseException;
 public boolean bReturnNull;
 public boolean bReturnCustomerWrongId;
 public boolean bReturnCustomerWithId;
 public CustomerDTO getCustomer(int id) {
  if(bThrowDatabaseException) { 
    throw new DatabaseException("xxx"); 
  } else if(bReturnNull) { 
    return null; 
  } else if(bReturnCustomerWrongId) { 
    throw new CustomerNotExistException(id);
  } else if(bReturnCustomerWithId) { 
    return new CustomerDTO(id); 
  }
 }
}

Then, in your test case you basically replace your "standard" instance of CustomerRepository with a mocked instance that will allow you to test your method for various outcomes of getCustomer:

public class CustomerRestTest {
  public void testGetCustomer_databaseFailure() {
    MockedCustomerRepository dto = new MockedCustomerRepository();
    dto.bThrowDataBaseException = true;
    yRestClass rest = new MyRestClass();
    rest.dto = dto;
    rest.getCustomer(0);
    // depending on what you do in your getCustomer method, you should check if you catched the exception, or let it pass, etc.. Make your assertions here

  public void testGetCustomer_customerNotExist() {
    // etc.
  }
}

Generally, every test method should test one thing only, this helps keep your tests small and focused on one task.

I'm going to repeat it :-) Writing a whole mocked class takes some time as you see. Consider using a mocking framework, the less one writes code, the less errors one makes, right? Mocking a method that throws an exception, or returns a given value for a given parameter is a piece of cake and takes 2 or 3 lines (with mockito at least)

Hope that helps testing your REST method.