I am 99% sure I have had a post like this in the past, but my google-foo was weak today and I could not find it. Do not let anyone blow smoke up your back side, testing is expensive, testing takes time but most importantly testing can help improve the quality of your code. If you are going to spend...
If you find yourself using reflection in your unit test to push 'stub’ data into it your test just may smell. Now there are times (especially when dealing with legacy code) that you need use reflection to crack open a class to push/pull values but I would strongly suggest you consider the solutions...
Part of my job at work is to teach and mentor other developers on our team. Right now I am in the process of teaching two of our developers how to create unit tests (notice I did NOT say integration tests because most anyone can do those). We are also learning how to create our tests by utilizing an...
In my last post ( here ) I was giving a wrap up of the Mocking session I recently did at TriNug . In that post I gave some of the reasons (sorry, I meant excuses) people gave for not doing any type of automated testing during their dally development ritual (notice I am staying away from TDD at this point...
I'm giving a talk on TDD at our local UG tonight, and under the influence of some recent posts here on devlicio.us, I just finished reworking my presentation. This post is an outline for the first half of my presentation. The Problems Code has entropy. That is over time it deteriorates. At least...
Test first Test during Test after Answer, Test. No matter what style of testing you believe in, they all share one common trait. They all test your code. So, what is the point of this post you may ask? Simple. To me, it does not matter how your tests come to be, but having tests is what is important...
Recently I was chatting with a friend of mine and he asked if a single developer could be successful following TDD on a team that does not follow TDD. My simple answer was YES, they can. But there are a few things you must consider..... How can they make a difference I am a firm believer that someone...
Over on the Alt.Net mailing list ( here ) the topic of where to put your unit tests was the hot topic a few days ago. This is a topic that I have debated with various people over the past few years. With all the debates I have had, it is clear to me that there really is no right or wrong way do to this...
Recently I was asked about backing in unit tests into an existing project. In particular I was asked A) was possible and B) is it worth it. In short my answers to both these are Yes and Yes. However, backing in unit tests is not without its challenges. I thought today I would go express my experiences...
In my last post I think I struck a cord with some people in my post 'Unit tests taking too much time'. My intent was NOT to sound like an elitist Agilist or any else of that nature. My intent was simply to put a post out there about the misperception (in my opinion) about how writing unit tests...