Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Unit Testing Silver Bullet

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/Unit-Testing-Silver-Bullet

I liked this article, I thought it was interesting to think about different ways to enforce code quality. The article's main focus was comparing TDD to Clean Room Software Development. If you don't read the article: Clean Room sounds like incredibly intense code reviews where you have to 'prove' mathematically to your peers that your code works. But I think comparing Clean Room to automated testing is comparing apples to oranges.

How would Clean Room help with maintaining legacy or bad code? What's the point in having a room full of people pour over a 1000 line method that only weirdo geniuses can understand? If you're not working with legacy code, then Clean Room sounds great if you have a room of people who want to pour over your code, but who has that liberty. At all the million (read 3) places I've worked, intensive code reviews has never been a priority.

Even if you worked somewhere that code reviews were a priority, and everything was peer reviewed constantly and you didn't have any legacy code, then great, forget automated testing! But the minute you don't have all those things you need something else. Peer review is great, but it's very brittle. I think that's one of the advantages of automated testing, you have an artifact that lives on and provides at least some value.

The article did have a good point though, what is the value of automated testing + TDD? I think that's really hard to quantify. Personally automated testing has rarely been useful for finding bugs (but when it has I do jump up and down and tell EVERYONE I can, it's awesome!). I have found it very helpful for learning. Whether it's an API or Legacy code I have to maintain. I also find it very helpful for designing my code (aka TDD). I'm totally addicted to this.

These days I stub out all my classes and start writing tests. I write tests for everything I want to say, then fill in the blanks, then write more tests. It's a very top down approach, but it's working for me. And what really sells me on it is that it has great side effect, automated tests that every once in a while make me jump up and down because they found a bug.

2 comments:

ekerwin said...

I'm not really clear on what Michael Feathers is trying to say. Is he saying that code quality doesn't increase by unit testing? If so, I don't think anyone could disagree. Unit testing doesn't change your code, so how would it improve quality?

If he's saying that code quality doesn't improve through TDD I would have to disagree. TDD makes your methods self-contained, maintable, easy to understand...how else can you define code quality?

Zachary D. Shaw said...

See I think he actually likes TDD.

One thing I didn't get at all was when he stated:

"If you subscribe to this theory, you expect to find fewer integration errors when you do integration testing and fewer “unit” errors when you do unit testing. It’s a nice theory, but it’s wrong. "

He never backs this up.

I think even talking about code quality is a red herring. To me code quality is much more art then science.

 
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