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+++ title = "Code is a Book, Unit Tests are Spellcheckers" date = 2020-02-14
[taxonomies] tags = ["unit tests", "testing", "integration tests", "books", "code"] +++
If we use an analogy for code as being the words in a book and the system being built as the whole book, then what are unit tests?
I just found this analogy pretty good1: You can to think about your code as a book: Each module is a chapter, each class is a paragraph and each function is a sentence.
In that analogy, were would unit tests sit?
To me, the unit tests are like spell checkers -- or, at least, the more modern ones: Are you writing the proper words? Are your sentences grammatically correct? The spell checker will take care of this.
But there is one thing that the spell checker won't do: make sure the chapter makes sense in the whole context of the book. Escaping the analogy for a moment, let me ask you this: Have you read "Les Misérables"? I did, and there is one chapter in the middle of the book in which Victor Hugo discuss the Battle of Waterloo. Although it makes sense in the historical point of the story of Les Misérables, it makes absolutely no sense in the general story itself -- no matter how well punctuate, correct in spelling and grammar it may be.
This is a huge failure of unit tests: They don't see the whole. The whole is given by reviewers of a book and integration tests of a system. Jumping back to the analogy, when you have your integration tests defined by the system requisites, anything that isn't being covered is a chapter that doesn't make sense in the whole of the book.
In the long run, as writers will remember the times the spell checker pointed a word was spelled wrong or a verb was in the wrong tense and, thus, make it pop less and less, so does unit tests: In the long run, the ROI2 of unit tests tend to go down, while the integration tests -- the ones that check if the "chapter" makes sense in the story being told by the "book" -- tend to go up.
And I just found the analogy so good for the way I see those two test methodologies.