Effective Unit Testing

Chapter 5. Maintainability

 

In this chapter

• Test smells that add to your cognitive load
• Test smells that make for a maintenance nightmare
• Test smells that cause erratic failures

 

In this second chapter of part 2 we turn our attention from the readability of test code toward its maintainability.

Many of us have heard the quip that code is read much more often than it’s written. That was the case with punch cards and it’s still the case today. That is why readability is so crucially important. When we go beyond merely looking at code, we step into the world of writing code—and most often “writing” really means modifying or extending an existing code base. Sometimes we call that maintenance and sometimes we call it development ...