Archive for the ‘Testing’ Category
Test patterns: red-green-refactor vs. frequent committing
Agile and lean principles lead to committing frequently, each commit potentially deployable to production. I’ve always been one to save my work often, and I commit often, not just whenever I finish an entire task, but whenever I’ve written enough code to justify running my tests, I do so, and they pass. This always seems like the right thing to do: it’s usually easy to break down big tasks into small, committable, deployable bits, and I can almost always point to the value in each commit, whether an implemented test, a refactoring or just a spelling fix. But I recently found myself in a situation where I realized that committing a (correct) test and its implementation that I’d just written would introduce a bug.
Test patterns: One test per path
I’ve seen many test suites which were much less thought through and much less well factored than the code they tested. But that’s not right: Tests drive the code, so tests are at least as important as code. You should care about the quality of your tests just as much as you do the quality of your code, and refactor your tests just as vigorously as you do your code. Here, then, are some thoughts on one aspect of good test design: the One test per path pattern.
