Testing

From the man himself, Kent Beck

I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence (I suspect this level of confidence is high compared to industry standards, but that could just be hubris). If I don’t typically make a kind of mistake (like setting the wrong variables in a constructor), I don’t test for it. I do tend to make sense of test errors, so I’m extra careful when I have logic with complicated conditionals. When coding on a team, I modify my strategy to carefully test code that we, collectively, tend to get wrong.

Different people will have different testing strategies based on this philosophy, but that seems reasonable to me given the immature state of understanding of how tests can best fit into the inner loop of coding. Ten or twenty years from now we’ll likely have a more universal theory of which tests to write, which tests not to write, and how to tell the difference. In the meantime, experimentation seems in order.

How deep are your unit tests?

Is TDD Dead

On the Diverse And Fantastical Shapes of Testing

Desirable traits of unit tests

Desirable Unit Tests

F.I.R.S.T.

Unit Tests Are F.I.R.S.T - Fast, Isolated, Repeatable, Self-Verifying, and Timely

What your tests don’t need to know will hurt you

Test Data Builders: an alternative to the Object Mother pattern

Unit Test Naming Convention

Include Only Relevant Details In Tests

Testing in a microservice architecture