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

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#21

Post by stephencanon » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:06 PM UTC

kevinherron wrote: post #8

I don't believe anybody that says they test all functionality. Most? Sure. All? No way. Not in a non-trivial codebase. Article about the group that writes the space shuttle software, sort of relevant?: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html

The trouble is that the poll doesn't have a middle ground between "all functionality" and "a few critical things".

A full run of our test suite literally takes months on a cluster of hundreds of CPUs (obviously, there are also faster versions of the tests which are run frequently). While I have a long list of additional test coverage that I would like to add, what we test is much closer to "all functionality" than it is to "a few critical things".

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#22

Post by Mc_Big_G » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:07 PM UTC

The day I changed one line of code and 100+ tests failed was the day I really got it.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#23

Post by falcolas » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:08 PM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #7

People ... don't have tests? o_O In 2012? I am seriously considering putting together a "Software Engineering for Small Teams" course or set of articles. With a little bit of expertise, you can inject testing in to most projects, use the minimum of Agile that'll help, and generally massively raise your game - and by that I mean code faster, better, and more reliably, with considerably less stress. (edited: turns out…

I'm a lot less surprised. Not everyone gets to work on a shiny new codebase which was created after regular testing was the norm. A lot of us work on maintaining code that's 5/10/20 years old, and have to worry about things like maintaining and adding functionality over refactoring the entire codebase to support unit tests.

When you're in this position, your going to get more value out of creating a smaller set of functional integration tests that cover the critical functions of the project. Sure, adding new tests as you add functionality is a good idea, but it's not going to result in total coverage for a very long time.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#24

Post by linguistbreaker » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:11 PM UTC

I don't always test my code, but when I do I do it in production. Stay thirsty my friends.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#25

Post by stephencanon » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:11 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #23

peteretep wrote: post #7

People ... don't have tests? o_O In 2012? I am seriously considering putting together a "Software Engineering for Small Teams" course or set of articles. With a little bit of expertise, you can inject testing in to most projects, use the minimum of Agile that'll help, and generally massively raise your game - and by that I mean code faster, better, and more reliably, with considerably less stress. (edited: turns out…

I'm a lot less surprised. Not everyone gets to work on a shiny new codebase which was created after regular testing was the norm. A lot of us work on maintaining code that's 5/10/20 years old, and have to worry about things like maintaining and adding functionality over refactoring the entire codebase to support unit tests. When you're in this position, your going to get more value out of creating a smaller set of fu…

The very first thing I do when I take over a codebase is to write tests. Without tests, it's impossible to do maintenance work or add functionality in any sort of rigorous fashion--how can you know that your assumptions about how the code works are correct? How can you know that your trivial change didn't break something?

Of course, tests don't actually tell you these things. But they can tell you that your assumptions were wrong, or that your trivial change broke feature xxx, and that's crucial information to have.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#26

Post by linguistbreaker » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:12 PM UTC

I don't always test my code, but when I do I do it in production.

Stay thirsty my friends.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#27

Post by peteretep » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:13 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #23

peteretep wrote: post #7

People ... don't have tests? o_O In 2012? I am seriously considering putting together a "Software Engineering for Small Teams" course or set of articles. With a little bit of expertise, you can inject testing in to most projects, use the minimum of Agile that'll help, and generally massively raise your game - and by that I mean code faster, better, and more reliably, with considerably less stress. (edited: turns out…

I'm a lot less surprised. Not everyone gets to work on a shiny new codebase which was created after regular testing was the norm. A lot of us work on maintaining code that's 5/10/20 years old, and have to worry about things like maintaining and adding functionality over refactoring the entire codebase to support unit tests. When you're in this position, your going to get more value out of creating a smaller set of fu…

Who's talking about adding all?

My area of expertise is adding tests to legacy codebases. Obviously you're not going to hit the whole thing overnight. But that's no excuse for not having /any/

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#28

Post by danmaz74 » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:13 PM UTC

On my latest project (Rails 3.1) I test thoroughly the back end code, but only in a limited way the CS front end code. I'm using jasmine there, but that is a lot of overhead.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#29

Post by fauigerzigerk » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:16 PM UTC

We would like to test a lot more but I really don't know how to test some of the critical stuff.

Just as an example, how do you test a parser that processes large amounts of sometimes sloppy semi structured text? Whether a particular defect should be classified as a bug in my parser or as a rare glitch in the source data is undecidable until I know how often the defect occurs.

What I need is a kind of heuristic test framework that makes sure the parser doesn't miss any large chunks that I only find out about weeks later if at all. I cannot supply individual test cases for everything that could possibly be found in the source data.

Re: Poll: Do you test your code?

#30

Post by bmj » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:17 PM UTC

stephencanon wrote: post #25

falcolas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a lot less surprised. Not everyone gets to work on a shiny new codebase which was created after regular testing was the norm. A lot of us work on maintaining code that's 5/10/20 years old, and have to worry about things like maintaining and adding functionality over refactoring the entire codebase to support unit tests. When you're in this position, your going to get more value out of creating a smaller set of fu…

The very first thing I do when I take over a codebase is to write tests. Without tests, it's impossible to do maintenance work or add functionality in any sort of rigorous fashion--how can you know that your assumptions about how the code works are correct? How can you know that your trivial change didn't break something? Of course, tests don't actually tell you these things. But they can tell you that your assumptio…

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.