Effective Unit Testing

Part 2. Catalog

The goal of part 2 is to help us better identify and fix problems with our test code, and we’re taking a “catalog”-style approach to accomplishing that. This catalog is one of test smells—traits and attributes we often encounter in test code that create or aggravate problems in terms of maintainability, readability, and trustworthiness.

We are wallowing in this puddle of anti-patterns instead of walking through a list of good practices because I’ve found it more effective to teach programmers to identify problems with their tests and to rectify them. After all, if we only know what a good test looks like, we’re still blind to the many flaws our code may have.

My good friend Bas Vodde likes to say that if you remove all the test ...