When Unit Tests aren’t Enough

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Unit Testing of your work is generally accepted as the mark of a professional developer. However – have you thought about what happens when you make a boo-boo on the tests you create?

You guessed it – everything goes to hell in a handbasket. If the tests are flawed, they aren’t really telling you anything. 

Sometimes it can be better (and faster)  to create an old-fashioned, Windows Forms test harness to exercise your “stuff”.

Right now, I’m working on a complex project with many dozens of classes – more of them every single day. Often we are asked to make changes to many of these classes. When I do these, all I need to do is fire up my Winforms Test Harness and press one of the buttons. I can have breakpoints in the code at strategic places, and I can view the end result in a DataGridView that’s on the form. Sure, you can do that with a unit test, but then what you’re doing is “testing a test”.

Unit Tests are definitely the way to go, but sometimes just being a Duct Tape Programmer solves the problem more easily.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Matt12:00 AM

    I agree with you abstractly, but if you offered a concrete example, I would show you a test that would remove the need for a manual test harness.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Derick1:06 AM

    People have been shot for less ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. brianmrush9:47 PM

    One of the things I wish these unit test frameworks did was allow for dynamic user input. Kind of like when you right click on a stored proc and click execute you can input the values for the the parameters.

    Maybe it could some type of additional tags on the unit test that detail what can be dynamic values. When a unit test is invoked from a client, it would prompt for the input values.

    In essence combine the approach of unit tests with the traditional win form testing harness

    ReplyDelete
  4. Matt6:40 AM

    @brianmrush Check out row tests in MbUnit and NUnit 2.5

    ReplyDelete

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