Types of Tests

http://searls.test-double.com/2012/04/01/types-of-tests

by davemo • 14 years ago

36 6 14 years ago

searls3• 14 years ago

I'll be checking this thread today and would be happy to respond to anyone's feedback or criticism.

davemo2• 14 years ago

I learned a lot reading this; in particular the discussion about fragility as it relates to using test-doubles for some collaborators and not for others in a single test instance. However, I absolutely love your conclusion hook as it validates (most of) my testing worldview.

I only say "most of" because I have rarely worked on a team where maximally realistic tests were anything but slow/fragile monstrosities that became stale very quickly.

I <3 isolation testing :)

searls3• 14 years ago

I'd be uncomfortable relying only on isolation tests, as they won't add much confidence that the application is in a working state.

For any project that's important, I'd really encourage even just one or two full-stack smoke tests that take a stroll through the system (as a separate build on CI). Most full-stack tests only become unbearably slow when they attempt to exhaustively cover everything in the application.

davemo2• 14 years ago

As an example, the current "application" I'm working on is basically a client-side implementation of an Excel spreadsheet written using Backbone.js. The idea of "maximally realistic tests" in this project involve manually comparing the calculations I've implemented in JavaScript to see if they match the output in the Excel sheet.

So, we've got great isolation tests that cover the UI functionality in the webapp and some simple calculation tests that verify behaviour for equations by providing the same inputs as the spreadsheet and verifying the output is the same (in this case, that means copy/pasting excel table values into the .toBe(expected) part of my specs).

I'm wondering, in this case how would I write remote full-stack or local full-stack tests?

codereview• 14 years ago

There's a lot of misconception about tests. If you're interested in how to start unit testing, check out this tutorial on Wednesday: http://j.mp/HPguPs

Types of Tests

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