Quality Code: Software Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns

Separate Your Concerns

Many of us think of separation of concerns when we design and code software but forget about it when we test. A common source of complexity in tests is a failure to separate the concerns.

For example, say you are creating a date-conversion library, two of the methods of which parse date strings into the underlying representation and format it into a display string. You could write a test that verifies the result by a round-trip, as in Listing 5-4.

Listing 5-4: Testing date parsing and formatting through round-trip conversion in JavaScript with Jasmine

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describe('DateLib', function() {  it('converts the date back into itself', function() {    var expectedDate = '17 Apr 2008 10:00 +1000';    var ...