How I Write Tests
Having responded to several comments here, I am concerned about the fact that most of the discourse here seems to fail to completely understand what the goals are of unit testing - and, worse, many comments, despite this omission, seem to be made with an air of confidence which I could see myself, when I was a junior developer, accepting as reliable, because of that tone. As of this writing, I feel that anyone new to unit testing that comes across this overall discussion will be sent down the wrong path and may not realize it for a very long time, and so I feel that it is important to outline what I feel are the most serious misconceptions about unit testing I see here.<p>* Code coverage&#x27;s value: code coverage is not a goal in and of itself. Seeing 100% code coverage should not make you feel comfortable, as a statistic, that there is adequate testing. If you have 100% coverage of branching, you might have indeed verified that the written code functions as intended in response to at least some possible inputs, but you have not verified that all necessary tests have been written - indeed, you cannot know this from this simple metric. To give a concrete example: if I write one test that tests only a good input to a single function in which I have forgotten a necessary null check, I will have 100% code coverage of that function, but I will not have 100% behavioral coverage - which brings me to the following point.<p>* What to think about when unit testing a function, or how to conceptualize the purpose of a unit test: unit tests should test behavior of code, so simply writing a unit test that calls a function with good input and verifies that no error is not in the correct spirit of testing. Several unit tests should call the same function, each with various cases of good and bad input - null pointer, empty list, list of bogus values, list of good values, and so on. Some sets of similar inputs reasonably can be grouped into one bigger unit test, given that their assert statements are each on their own line so as to be easily identifiable from error output, but there should nevertheless be a set of unit tests that cover all possible inputs and desired behaviors.<p>* Unit test scope: A commenter I responded to in another thread had given criticism along the lines of that by making two unit tests which test cases A and B entirely independent, you fail to test the case &quot;A and B&quot;. This is a misunderstanding of what the scope of a unit test should be in order to be a good unit test - which, incidentally goes along with misunderstanding the intent of a unit test. A unit test, conceptually, should check that the behavior of one piece of functional code under one specific condition is as intended or expected. The scope of a unit test should be the smallest scope a test can without being trivial; we write unit tests this way so that a code change later that introduces a bug will hopefully not only be caught, but be caught with the most specificity possible - test failures should the engineer a story along the lines of &quot;_this_ code path behaved incorrectly when called with _this_ input, and the error occurs on _this_ line&quot;. More complex behavior, of the sort of &quot;if A and B&quot;, is an integration test; integration tests are the tool that has been developed to verify more complex behavior. If you find yourself writing a unit test that is testing the interaction of multiple variables, you should pause to consider whether you should not move the code you are writing into an integration test, and write two new, smaller unit tests, each of which verifies behavior of each input independent of another.<p>* Applying DRY to test setup: if you abstract away test setups, you are working against the express intention of each unit test being able to catch one specific failure case, independently of other tests. Furthermore, you are introducing the possibility of systematic errors in your application in the _very possible_ case of inserting an error in the abstractions you have identified in your test setup! Furthermore, f you find yourself setting up the same test data in many places, that should not suggest to you to abstract away the test setup - to you, it should rather hint at what is likely a poor separation of concerns and&#x2F;or insufficient decoupling in your software&#x27;s design. If you are duplicating test code, check whether you have failed to apply the DRY principle in your application&#x27;s code - don&#x27;t try to apply it to the test code.<p>And, in my opinion, the most important and common misconception I see here, and I really feel that it should be more widely understood - and, in fact, that many problems with legacy code will likely largely stop occurring if this mindset becomes widespread:<p>* Why do we write unit tests?<p>We write unit tests to verify the behavior of written code with respect to various inputs, yes. But that is only the mechanics of writing unit tests, and I fear that that is what most people think is the sole function of unit tests; behind the mechanics of a method there should be a philosophy, and there is.<p>Unit tests actually serve a potentially (subjectively, I would say &quot;perhaps almost always&quot;) far more vital purpose, in the long term: when an engineer writes unit tests to verify behavior of the code he has written, he is, in fact, writing down an explicit demonstration what he intended the program to _do_; that is, he is, in a way, leaving a record of the design goals and considerations of the software.<p>(Slight aside: in my opinion, being a good software engineer does _not_ mean you write a clever solution to a problem and move on forever; rather, it means that you decompose the problem into its simplest useful components and then use those components to implement a solution to the problem at hand whose structure is clear by design and is easy for others to read and understand. It further means (or should mean) that you then implement not only verification of the functionality you had in mind and its robustness to invalid inputs which you cannot guarantee will never arrive, but also implement in such a way that it indicates what your design considerations were but serves as a guard against a change that unknowingly contradicts these considerations as a result of a change made by someone else (or yourself!) at a later time.<p>Later, when the code must be revisited, altered, or fixed, such unit tests, if well-written, immediately communicate what the intended behavior of the code is, in a way that cannot be as clearly (or even necessarily, almost definitely not immediately) inferred from reading the source code.<p>In summary, these are the main points that stuck out to me in the conversations here; I do want to emphasize that the last point above is, in my opinion, the most glaring omission here, because it is an overall mindset rather than a particular consideration.