Comments on: Don’t Unit Test? Start Counting Your “Oh Shits!”

By: Caffeinated Coder >> Russell Ball » The November 2007 Caffeinated Codey Winners Are…

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 04:41:54 +0000

[...] Most Persuasive TDD argument…Max Pool for his post Don’t Unit Test? Start Counting Your “Oh Shits!”. I had to quit counting my own exclamations after a few hours because I ran out of fingers and toes, [...]

By: Caffeinated Coder » Blog Archive » 2007 Caffeinated Codey Final Showdown

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 07:07:17 +0000

[...] Pool for Don’t Unit Test? Start Counting Your “Oh Shits!” [Nov [...]

By: Caffeinated Coder » 2007 Caffeinated Codey Final Showdown

Caffeinated Coder » 2007 Caffeinated Codey Final Showdown — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 06:06:23 +0000

[...] Pool for Don’t Unit Test? Start Counting Your “Oh Shits!” [Nov [...]

By: Caffeinated Coder

Caffeinated Coder — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 13:54:12 +0000

The November 2007 Caffeinated Codey Winners Are…

The November 2007 Caffeinated Codey Winners Are…

By: Daily Dose of Links - 20071116 « Daily Geek Bits

Daily Dose of Links - 20071116 « Daily Geek Bits — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:43:36 +0000

[...] Don’t Unit Test? Start Counting Your "Oh Shits!" (via Arjan’s World) [...]

By: Seth Schubert

Seth Schubert — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:13:23 +0000

I’m luckily in the position where my company has embraced automated testing – the applications I’ve built over the last several months were allowed development time to write comprehensive automated tests suites. We still have the occasional “oh shit” due to the fact that even good test suite with decent coverage won’t catch everything, but nothing on the level of applications I’ve dealt with in the past. I can honestly say testing is worth the time from real world experience. Just my 2 pennies ;).

By: Justin Deltener

Justin Deltener — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:54:58 +0000

Damn you Max. 4 oh shits in 4 hours isn’t a good start to my day…especially if it even remotely implies you’re right!

By: James Golick

James Golick — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:26:10 +0000

I think even before the “oh shit” moments, you’re probably spending enough time manually testing your code that you would pretty much break even writing unit tests.

At some point, after you write a portion of code, you run it. Then, you look at the results, and if something is broken, you try to fix it, and then run the code again, repeating this process until you see that the code works as expected. I would argue that the time it takes to write the unit tests is usually about equal to the time it takes to perform that manual process over and over again, not to mention the time it saves on regressions, and elsewhere.

For more on that, I wrote an essay on the topic that can be found here: http://jamesgolick.com/2007/8/.....r-luxuries

By: Max Pool

Max Pool — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:00:07 +0000

@Neil -

This of course is why I am saying to start measuring how much time you are wasting. It is easy to sell unit testing then when it is pitched like this:

“Can I spend 40% more time building tests, so I can quit wasting 70% of my time fixing bugs that shouldn’t have occurred?”

By: Neil Barnwell

Neil Barnwell — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:31:21 +0000

Of course the really hard bit is starting to add unit tests to that huge application you already have, that’s not written with unit testing in mind. You start to need to count the “Oh shit, I could’ve avoided this with a unit test” separate from “Oh shit, if only this system didn’t need re-writing to be able to unit test it.”.

I think there is a separate group of people in addition to the “unit tests are part of my day” and “I don’t have time for unit tests”, who are the ones that find it hard to convince their bosses/customers they now need 40% more time to develop those changes.

And at what point is the amount of refactoring that’s required to implement unit tests into existing code more risky than not having the unit tests. Does that depend on when you’re planning on making it a legacy application?

As always, putting unit tests into new code is far easier than trying to unit test existing code that wasn’t written with IOC etc in mind. Decisions, decisions…