Title: This is only a test

Author: Bob Schmidt

Date: 08 September 2019 17:30:55 +01:00 or Sun, 08 September 2019 17:30:55 +01:00

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It sometimes seems to me that the idea of automated software testing hasn’t really taken hold. I often hear of development teams talking up the fact that they do Test Driven Development, but when pressed, admit the tests aren’t really driving the effort, and are often pretty sparse.

I also hear of teams making a big thing of being really ‘test focussed’, but when pressed, it becomes apparent they mean they spend huge amounts of time and effort in manually testing their software – often by just running it to see what happens. Of course, that’s a valid, even important aspect of testing – unit tests aren’t great at testing whether an application even starts successfully – but it should be one of many aspects, rather than the whole game.

A common refrain is that developers don’t have time (or aren’t paid) for writing tests, they need to spend their time on writing productive code. Related to this are those developers who insist that it’s someone else’s job (usually, a junior team member) to write the tests. I suspect most readers of CVu would agree that this misses the vital point about test code, that it isn’t just test code. It’s part of the whole conversation about the code, documenting the author’s assumptions and approaches, both good and bad, as well as providing a facility to check for regressions in the future. Unit tests are a form of communication, not merely an extra thing to do, or box to tick.

Higher quality tests provide higher quality communications within a team, and to future generations of the team working with those tests, and the code they support. There is so much more to tests than testing!

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