Quality Code: Software Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns

Exercising Options

For the next feature, I started supporting options. Perhaps the most useful option writes the retrieved content to a file, although you could always redirect the output without it. I started work on the “-O” option by updating the specification to detail curl’s behavior in [bb7347e].

The path to support this option meanders a bit. Admittedly, I did not start with a complete or clean concept of how the feature would be implemented. Rather, I started with an idea of how the arguments might be processed but only a clear understanding that the output handling might be tricky to test properly. I decided to show the messiness and the associated variations of testing rather than doing exploratory spikes and then reverting them to ...