Archive for February, 2009
What My Cat Brought In Last Night
First of all, please to forgive. I have been lived under a rock for the past two years and also a little bit more, which brings my level of English further southward than the latitude of my current abode, along with the level of technical knowledge I possess. If you came here to read an intellectually stimulating discussion about cutting edge technology, methodology or synergy, I am sure to disappoint.
Benefits of automated functional testing (was: Why unit testing is a waste of time)
Update 2009-06-30: Despite the attention seeking title and first few paragraphs, the point I was trying to make with this post was about the benefits of automated functional testing. Since it’s been posted to proggit and hacker news, a number of people have objected to the misleading intro. Apologies for that, and please start reading from “Benefits of automated functional tests” if you’re not interested in the misdirection! — Tim.
In the last few years of writing “enterprise” software in Java I’ve created and maintained thousands of unit tests, often working on projects that require 80% or better code coverage. Lots of little automated tests, each mocking out dependencies in order to isolate just one unit of code, ensuring minimal defects and allowing us to confidently refactor code without breaking everything. Ha! I’ve concluded that we’d be better off deleting 90% of these tests and saving a lot of time and money in the process.
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