October 2009
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
8h 54m
English
Content preview from Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
Chapter 23. Test Diagnostics
Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
—James Joyce
Design to Fail
The point of a test is not to pass but to fail. We want the production code to pass its tests, but we also want the tests to detect and report any errors that do exist. A “failing” test has actually succeeded at the job it was designed to do. Even unexpected test failures, in an area unrelated to where we are working, can be valuable because they reveal implicit relationships in the code that we hadn’t noticed.
One situation we want to avoid, however, is when we can’t diagnose a test failure that has happened. The last thing we should have to do is crack open the debugger and step through the tested code to find the point of disagreement. At a minimum, ...