I really should do a write-up about the CI and code quality infrastructure that I’ve set up, as in recent months it’s really started to pay off for the considerable effort it’s cost. But that’s not what’s on my mind today.
Rather I am struck by how easy it is to really stuff up unit tests, and how hard it is to get them right. I’m not so concerned with simple things like the proportion of code that is covered by tests, although that is important, so much as the difficulty of testing what code should do instead of what it does do. This is not simply an artefact of TDD either, although one of the problems I have with TDD is that it can lead to beautiful tests accurately exercising code that does not actually meet requirements – it worries me that Agile is often treated as an excuse not to define or identify requirements in much depth.
Two examples that I’ve seen recently – and have been equally guilty of – stand out.
First is falling into the trap of inadvertently testing the behaviour of a complex mock object rather than the behaviour of the real object. I’ve been on a warpath across the code for this one, as in retrospect it reveals bad code smells that I really should have picked up earlier.
Second is testing around the desired behaviour – for instance a method that transforms some value into a String, which has tests for the failure case of a bad input, tests that the returned String is not blank or null, but no tests that verify that the output for a given known input is the expected output.
In both cases it feels like we’re looking too closely at the implementation of the method, rather than stepping back and looking at the contract the method has.
Testing. Hard it is.
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