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Showing posts from June, 2017

What role are your tests serving.

We had a discussion at work after watching the excellent Kelvin Henney talk about good unit tests . And it helped me clarify the many roles tests play and why people get a habit of complaining about their tests getting in the way. So here is the four categories a test is trying to balance: Requirements Regression Documentation Refactoring guide Most test today are written as requirements . And this is a huge improvement over the past when we'd write tests later and try and get code coverage. Those 'later' tests are useless. The requirement tests happen for high level acceptance tests and in low level TDD too. Your test defines a behaviour you want. Once your test passes you don't go back to change it at all beyond some obvious cleanups like code duplication. These tests allow rapid development and reliable progress. But they can hinder refactoring, provide poor feedback on failures for regression and may be too implementation focused to be readable. And eas