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122 lines
5.0 KiB
122 lines
5.0 KiB
11 months ago
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<div class="sidebar-about">
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me"><h1>Julio Biason .Me 4.3</h1></a>
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<p class="lead">Old school dev living in a 2.0 dev world</p>
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<div class="post">
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<h1 class="post-title">Code is a Book, Unit Tests are Spellcheckers</h1>
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<span class="post-date">
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2020-02-14
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/unit-tests/">#unit tests</a>
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/testing/">#testing</a>
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/integration-tests/">#integration tests</a>
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/books/">#books</a>
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/code/">#code</a>
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</span>
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<p>If we use an analogy for code as being the words in a book and the system
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being built as the whole book, then what are unit tests?</p>
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<span id="continue-reading"></span>
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<p>I just found this analogy pretty good<sup class="footnote-reference"><a href="#1">1</a></sup>: You can to think about your code
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as a book: Each module is a chapter, each class is a paragraph and each
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function is a sentence.</p>
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<p>In that analogy, were would unit tests sit?</p>
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<p>To me, the unit tests are like spell checkers -- or, at least, the more modern
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ones: Are you writing the proper words? Are your sentences grammatically
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correct? The spell checker will take care of this.</p>
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<p>But there is one thing that the spell checker won't do: make sure the chapter
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makes sense in the whole context of the book. Escaping the analogy for a
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moment, let me ask you this: Have you read "Les Misérables"? I did, and there
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is one chapter in the middle of the book in which Victor Hugo discuss the
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Battle of Waterloo. Although it makes sense in the historical point of the
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story of Les Misérables, it makes absolutely no sense in the general story
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itself -- no matter how well punctuate, correct in spelling and grammar it may
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be.</p>
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<p>This is a huge failure of unit tests: They don't see the whole. The whole is
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given by reviewers of a book and integration tests of a system. Jumping back
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to the analogy, when you have your integration tests defined by the system
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requisites, anything that isn't being covered is a chapter that doesn't make
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sense in the whole of the book.</p>
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<p>In the long run, as writers will remember the times the spell checker
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pointed a word was spelled wrong or a verb was in the wrong tense and, thus,
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make it pop less and less, so does unit tests: In the long run, the ROI<sup class="footnote-reference"><a href="#2">2</a></sup> of
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unit tests tend to go down, while the integration tests -- the ones that check
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if the "chapter" makes sense in the story being told by the "book" -- tend to
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go up.</p>
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<p>And I just found the analogy so good for the way I see those two test
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methodologies.</p>
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<hr />
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<div class="footnote-definition" id="1"><sup class="footnote-definition-label">1</sup>
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<p>... but I lost the source of it. :(</p>
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</div>
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<div class="footnote-definition" id="2"><sup class="footnote-definition-label">2</sup>
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<p>"Return Of Investment"</p>
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