Be professional, do unit tests : MadeByMonsieur

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Be professional, do unit tests

by tkoski

Let us see the hands of developers who are practising Test Driven Development or at least does unit tests before the code is delivered?

We have been asking the above question in different conferences, companies and community meetings. In average 40% 25% of developers rise their hands.

That is awful.

Only 25% does unit tests? It means that 75% of the developers don’t know if their code works or not!

We, developers, should be ashamed of ourself.

If we are not doing unit tests at this point in the history of software development then something is wrong.

People have been talking about the practise already far too long and the conclusions are always the same:

it helps you so much
it makes you go so much faster
it helps you to deliver much better code

If you are not doing unit tests you need to seriously stop and consider why.

Are you not doing TDD because your management does not support it? Are you not doing unit tests because “it brings too much overhead to the project”? Are you not doing unit tests because “it makes the development slower”?

It is unprofessional to not know that your code works. It is unprofessional to release code that you are not sure if it will work or not. Know that it works.

And how do you know that it works? We got tests.

So lets do sane unit tests at least in one point of the project.

–
tuomas@madebymonsieur.com

Update:

Published: October 27, 2010

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Tags: devworking

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http://hernan43.github.com/ hernan43

I don’t do TDD currently because I don’t know how. I have tried to teach myself a few times but I always seem to fall flat on my face. I absolutely see the value in it, but I feel that I don’t know what I’m doing.

I am currently on my 3rd or 4th serious attempt at it, and this time I’m gonna try and stick to it.
Anonymous

“Only 40% does Test Driven Development (TDD)? It means that 60% of the developers don’t know if their code works or not!” is mindless non-reasoning. I do plenty of development with TDD, but you’re totally full of shit.

Promote TDD based on what it can do to improve on existing devleopment methodologies. Don’t promote it by claiming that anyone who doesn’t use it is automatically some kind of a failure.

http://twitter.com/madebymonsieur Made by Monsieur

Hi Kevingadd,it seems that the goal of the post is not very clear. Sorry about that.The idea of the post was to make people to just start doing unit tests to their code. It’s a bit of a rant. It seemed to end up being a mess between TDD and Unit Tests.

You_are_anon_so_i_am

You are, dear unknown author of this post, missing & messing.

- TDD is just a subset of the possible testing practices.
- Unit test is not TDD.
- TDD doesn’t help “to do the tests before it’s too late”; it forces you to have test before the actual code.

http://twitter.com/madebymonsieur Made by Monsieur

You are right. The ending line of the post was was and easy to misunderstand. Removed.

And the intention is not to be anonymous. tuomas@madebymonsieur.com is the author of this

mjw

There’s a big difference between telling someone, “the code you’re delivering is not meeting objectively-decided maintainability goals for this project”, and micromanaging the personal workflow which someone uses to acheive these goals (test first, test soon after, use TDD as your primary deisgn methodology vs use whatever design methodology has worked for you in the past).

Trying to do the latter, especially when it’s done with a tone of superiority and “you’re doing it wrong”, I think sums up why TDD advocates often tend to rub people up the wrong way — especially experienced programmers.
http://Scrumology.com Kane Mar

>People have been talking about the practise already far too long and the conclusions are always the same:
>
>-it helps you so much
>-it makes you go so much faster
>-it helps you to deliver much better code

Can you substantiate these claims? Do you have any references to support this?

The reason I ask, is because until about 2 years ago I had assumed that the evidence for TDD was overwhelming … until I started to look for the material [references provided at the end of my comments]. What I found was that all the available papers on TDD were either inconclusive or contradictory. In particular, there was *no* consensus that TDD “helps you so much,” and *no* consensus that “it makes you go so much faster.”

There was however, a clear correlation between TDD (and also comprehensive unit tests) and a significant reduction in the number of defects. This last fact was universal in all the papers that I reviewed in my search. Having looked at the data available, I personally feel that promising that TDD will improve your design and productivity is disingenuous. If I’m going to promising anything, it’s that TDD will improve the quality of the final product … and that should be reason enough to adopt TDD.

Thanks for the thought provoking post.
Kane.

Notes:
After I starting reviewing some of the TDD literature and studies, I wrote a series of three blog posts documenting my findings. Part 1: http://bit.ly/bXxllg Part 2: http://bit.ly/d5f5ag and Part 3: http://bit.ly/aajRjT

I also tabulated all the papers that I review in a google spreadsheet and made comments as I went along. The spreadsheet is referenced and linked in the first blog post, but here it is again for the lazy: http://bit.ly/ajWV10

http://twitter.com/madebymonsieur Made by Monsieur

Hi Kane,

thanks for your awesome reply.

I need to say from the start that the post I wrote was a “rant” written in 5 minutes after I needed to explain why we are doing unit tests.

It’s clearly visible now that the post is not well written. The goal was not to support TDD but to just ask developers to start doing unit tests to their code. It’s really worth it.

It was also not meant to provoke. But it’s a good that it caused excellent feedback like yours.

I’ll read the contents you send us and will get back to you.

Once again, thanks!

http://www.robmills.me/ Rob Mills

I think some of the comments have been a little overly critical. I for one am in total support of TDD. I agree that it helps you and that you end up delivering better code however, making you faster… not so much. It takes more time to write code this way but I think it’s worth it.

http://twitter.com/madebymonsieur Made by Monsieur

Thanks for the support Rob.

Yes, when you stick with the unit tests and the project gets older, the more faster it gets. Implementing quick changes will be so much faster. No?

Keil

OK for TDD, but NOK for PHP Unit Tests.

First of all, the development of PHP Unit Tests is a pain in the … to use with the framework provided by Sebastian Bergmann. This framework lacks cruelly of right documentation so it is always hard to evaluate the time that will take suchPHP Unit Tests.
Moreover, the framework is well-stuffed but cannot manage any mocks of singleton, or static methods.

Second, at my workplace, we have a so much unit tested component validating every part of the code. And it is this same component that is sometime rollbacked when just pushed to production.

As a developer, I still cannot fully understand the goal of Unit Tests. For my personal projects, I don’t mind using PHPUnit to make functional tests. I think that is the goal that it should deserve.

So far I am using PHPUnit (about 1 year), I sometimes think that I should develop a project in Java and use JUnit. Maybe Java’s Unit Tests Framework is better and can help me understand better its purpose.

So, OK for TDD (Functional Tests, Load Tests, …). But it is too hard for me to worship Sebastian Bergmann.

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