Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

4. Testing

© Jennifer M. Kohnke

Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.

—Seneca (c. 3 B.C.–A.D. 65)

The act of writing a unit test is more an act of design than of verification. It is also more an act of documentation than of verification. The act of writing a unit test closes a remarkable number of feedback loops, the least of which is the one pertaining to verification of function.

Test-Driven Development

Suppose that we followed three simple rules.

1. Don’t write any production code until you have written a failing unit test.
2. Don’t write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail or fail to compile.
3. Don’t write any more production ...