Effective Unit Testing

Chapter 6. Trustworthiness

 

In this chapter

• Test smells around code comments
• Test smells around poor expectation management
• Test smells around conditional execution

 

Trust is good and we generally like it when people are trustworthy. We’d prefer to be able to trust people, as it makes a lot of things in life easier. We’d also like to be able to trust our code—which is one of the reasons we write tests—and the trustworthiness of our tests is a big deal for us. Software development is essentially about modifying, evolving, and maintaining code, and if we can’t trust our tests, we can’t be too confident about our code working after even the most seemingly innocent change.

This chapter is a walkthrough of some of the biggest ...