A Philosophy of Testing

[jducoeur]

My technical blog is very Scala-centric, so not too many of the folks here are interested in it.

But for the programmers in the audience: I just finished posting a long-simmering series of articles about testing Scala services that some of you may find fun. It's somewhat heretical, including premises like:

• Unit tests are mostly a waste of time for idiomatic Scala services.
• You should focus on "scenario tests", that hammer the APIs and stub all externalities.
• 100% test coverage is the only meaningful number, and you should get there.
• Your code should be designed specifically to be testable, including hooks as needed to expose internal events to the test harness.

Not all of it applies to other languages and situations, but a fair amount of it does. So if you are curious about the topic, give it a read -- I'd love to get some conversation going about the topic, either there or here.

Comments

[mindstalk]

When I got hired in 1998 by a 30 person startup, they already had a very nice nightly build/test system, running unit and regression tests of the CVS code, and emailing developers if a test failed. C++ codebase. So someone had the idea.

[jducoeur]

Neat! The idea was certainly in the air (I started hearing about this stuff in 1999), but was quite unusual then. That was a foresightful company...