Poll: Do you test your code? • Hacker News Board

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#141

Post by MartinCron » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:02 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #107

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #33

I used to get code back from developers EACH AND EVERY TIME with massive bugs like: unable to register, unable to login, unable to add content. I wrongly assumed that they at least ran through and checked for any bugs they introduced before sending me the new code. So each and every time I got code back I had to go through manually and check it, sign in, log out, register, add content, delete content, edit content, a…

Please don't fix this with a technical solution. There is some reason that your developers aren't engaged in the work. Figure out why they don't care about working code or the user experience and fix that. If you plug the obvious holes, you won't have fixed your quality problems; you'll just shift them to the places where you won't notice them right away.

Please don't fix this with a technical solution.

I can't agree more with wpietri above. There surely is a non-technical problem at play. That isn't to say that you shouldn't try to automate your babysitting, but if your need for babysitting is that severe, you have other problems.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#142

Post by reddit_clone » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:04 PM UTC

tomgallard wrote: post #13

darinrogers wrote: post #5

In my experience, on projects with often-run automated unit test suites with good coverage, development goes faster. Part of this might be because for code to be highly testable, it usually also has to be well-designed and architecturally sound.

I agree. When interviewing I can usually weed out those who write tests (and write good tests) from those who just claim they do. How? People who don't really write tests will tell me that the advantage of unit testing is being able to see when code changes have broken stuff (which is fair enough and true). Those who regularly write unit tests will probably bring this up- but often their first point will be 'It helps…

You are mixing up automated Unit Testing with TDD. They overlap a lot but they are not the same.

There are people who could write quality software with good test coverage without following TDD style.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#143

Post by Tinned_Tuna » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:04 PM UTC

I really wish automated testing was significantly better for Java and the ilk. To steal from the Haskell world, I want to augment JUnit/TestNG with Small and QuickCheck.

The tests would go something like this: 1: SmallCheck exhaustively tests the small cases 2: JUnit/TestNG tests the main use-cases. 3: QuickCheck produces a lot of random tests and hammers the APIs.

Sadly (for Java at least) this appears to be a rather difficult ask.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#144

Post by diminoten » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:07 PM UTC

callmeed wrote: post #113

I answered "a few critical things" ... but, for the most part, testing is tedious, frustrating, and a time-sink for me. I recently paid someone $100+ an hour for some remote TDD coaching. It's helping a bit but hasn't really change my attitude towards testing (yet). What bugs me: - Testing frameworks and "best practices" change way faster than language frameworks and I simply can't keep up. What rspec version do I us…

How do you feel about regression testing? Maybe instead of "writing" tests for potential bugs, you write tests for bugs you've found already.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#145

Post by nkassis » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:07 PM UTC

callmeed wrote: post #113

I answered "a few critical things" ... but, for the most part, testing is tedious, frustrating, and a time-sink for me. I recently paid someone $100+ an hour for some remote TDD coaching. It's helping a bit but hasn't really change my attitude towards testing (yet). What bugs me: - Testing frameworks and "best practices" change way faster than language frameworks and I simply can't keep up. What rspec version do I us…

"- Most bugs/edge cases I encounter in our production apps are things I'd never think to write a test for ..."

I feel that way often too but I write test more as a specification for how I want the code to work then as a catch all bugs thing.

"- I deal with custom domains, authentication, and 3rd party API calls in almost every app we have. IMO, this adds 20% or more to the (already high) testing overhead just to get these things configured right in the test suite - More code is moving to front-end Javascript stuff ... so, now I have to write Rails tests AND JS tests? Sounds delightful"

I feel your pain, I code stuff that use WebGL currently and I find it hard to test that stuff.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#146

Post by bmj » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:08 PM UTC

MartinCron wrote: post #134

bmj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you always have the time/bandwidth to write these tests? I'm curious what you might do if an old codebase lands in your lap and someone says "here, fix these bugs by the impossible_length_of_time." I appreciate the idea here, and I've done the same in certain circumstances, but typically that means writing tests for bits of functionality that I need to touch.

Do you always have the time/bandwidth to write these tests? Does an ER surgeon always have the time/bandwidth to scrub hands before surgery?

Does an ER surgeon always have the time/bandwidth to scrub hands before surgery?

Does it potentially take the surgeon several days to scrub before an emergency surgery?

Edited to add: I appreciate the analogy, but it's flawed. If someone comes to me and says "here, developer A is on holiday, and we have this bug that it causing massive disruption in the field," is it appropriate for me to say "well, I can do that, but it will likely take me five days so I can understand the codebase and write the appropriate unit test suite."

This is circumstance I thinking about, not necessarily inheriting a codebase and having to add features to it. In that case, certainly, I'm going to take my time, read the code, and write tests.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#147

Post by functionform » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:18 PM UTC

I chose tests all functionality, but thats completely unrealistic. We TRY to test everything beyond just critical items, but we'll never get there.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#148

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:21 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#149

Post by geebee » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:22 PM UTC

obiefernandez wrote: post #68

These options are flawed. I am somewhere in the middle of of the first two: mostly integration tests, with critical domain logic unit tested. Certainly not 100% of the app's functionality, closer to 80%

I agree. this poll forces me to choose between a test suite that tests "all functionality" and "a few critical things". I think a lot of people who value high levels of testing coverage still fall somewhat short of all functionality, but are way above "a few critical things".

I'm using rails these days, and I have 100% test coverage on models and controllers (though that really just means that all the model and controller code is executed when I run my tests, these tools can't really tell if you've tested the code intelligently, though I hope I have).

I don't have a full suite of integration tests that validate all of the view logic, though there are some checks. I also have integration tests that validate external dependencies (file storage, database connectivity, etc), though again, there may be some holes.

I picked "all", since that's closest to where I am. But my best choice would be "we maintain a high (95%+) level of testing coverage". I don't think I'm splitting hairs here, because there may be a practical tradeoff between high levels and complete levels of test coverage.

NOTE: "high" levels of testing can mean different things to different people... doesn't have to be 95%, which I would consider to be higher than absolutely necessary. It depends so much on what you're actually testing (anyone who has used a coverage tool knows you can often "trick" the tool into awarding the 100% bar without doing much other than just making sure the tests run the code... which is useful in its way but can let all kinds of errors slip through).

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#150

Post by tikhonj » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:24 PM UTC

callmeed wrote: post #113

I answered "a few critical things" ... but, for the most part, testing is tedious, frustrating, and a time-sink for me. I recently paid someone $100+ an hour for some remote TDD coaching. It's helping a bit but hasn't really change my attitude towards testing (yet). What bugs me: - Testing frameworks and "best practices" change way faster than language frameworks and I simply can't keep up. What rspec version do I us…

You should check out QuickCheck for catching edge cases you did not think of. The idea behind QuickCheck is simple--you specify invariants in your code (called "properties") and the framework tests them with random inputs.

This tool is very widely used in Haskell, but it's been ported to a whole bunch of other languages and could make your testing more thorough. In Haskell it's also easy to use and more fun than normal tests, but I don't know what it would be like in a different language.