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What are your programming hot takes?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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In unit testing, a "unit" does not have to be the smallest possible section of code. It can be a while class or module or even set of related classes/modules. Testing individual functions in isolation leads to brittle tests that easily break during refactoring. Testing overall system behaviour results in more robust tests that require fewer changes during refactoring which gives you more confidence then you have not introduced a regression.
This is the correct comment.
Martin Fowler called them sociable tests. The only way to properly test your units' behavior is to pull in their dependencies. Isolated tests are useless, brittle and slow to write.
Yeah I'm of the opinion that unit tests are usually a waste of time and people should only write integration tests.
The only time I think unit tests are valuable is for checking edge cases when e.g. interacting with the operating system.
I believe we should have a new word that differentiates between ultra-basic tiny unit tests, and bigger unit tests that are still not integration tests.
E.g. rust and some other newer languages have a way to write basically an inline test for a function — that would constitute my former category. These make sense during development as a reality check. “Yes, this ad hoc stack I need inside this class should have two elements if I push two elems” sort of thing. That implementation may not even be accessible from the outside in case of an OOP language so you can’t even properly test it. Also, these are the ones that should change with the code and removing them is no big deal.
The other kind should work against the public APIs of libs/classes and they should not be rewritten on internal changes at all.