PragPub 2010-03: Issue #9 by The Pragmatic Bookshelf

Author:The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: PragPub—Monthly Magazine
Publisher: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, LLC
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Testing as Contract

A Modest Proposal

by Brian Tarbox

Are software tests too important to be left to just any programmer?

One of the realities of development these days is that our software teams have heterogeneous skill levels. Most teams contain a mix of veterans and rookies. There can be large differences in how seriously people take continuing education, too. My team, for example, has a member who just announced that he never learned any of the Java 5 features and so couldn’t work on areas that used generics. Considering that we’re now migrating from Java 6 toward Groovy, this team member is pretty far behind the curve.

As a field we keep trying to find procedures, methods, or paradigms to deal with the fact that not all developers are equal. It goes against the grain to say that some developers are simply better than others, but the average developer is—well—average!

One of the approaches we’ve used to deal with differing skill levels is Test Driven Development. Most shops now at least pay lip service to the importance of unit testing—although from comparing notes at conferences, I’d say the number of shops that actually require that the tests be written before the “real” code is still pretty small.

I want to argue that TDD focuses on the wrong problem.

The developers who understand the importance of unit tests and who write comprehensive and subtle tests are exactly the group that need them the least. The “average” or inexperienced developer probably doesn’t believe in unit tests and will write bad or pointless tests if forced to do so. I have empirical evidence that they won’t write tests that aggressively try to break their classes. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve had to turn on CheckStyle’s “unit test must contain an assert” test so as to force some of my team to write unit tests that actually test something.

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