Effective Software Testing

9 Writing larger tests

This chapter covers

• Deciding when to write a larger test
• Engineering reliable integration and system tests

Most of the code we tested in previous chapters could be tested via unit tests. When that was not possible because, say, the class depended on something else, we used stubs and mocks to replace the dependency, and we still wrote a unit test. As I said when we discussed the testing pyramid in chapter 1, I favor unit tests as much as possible when testing business rules.

But not everything in our systems can (or should) be tested via unit tests. Writing unit tests for some pieces of code is a waste of time. Forcing yourself to write unit tests for them would result in test suites that are not good enough to find bugs, ...