Comment by Ragnarork

Comment by Ragnarork 6 days ago

Writing tests isn't free but writing non-regression tests for bugs that were actually fixed is one of the best test cases to consider writing right away, before the bug is fixed. You'll be reproducing the bug anyway (so already consider how to reproduce). You'll also have the most information about it to make sure the test is well written anyway, after building a mental model around the bug.

Writing tests isn't free, I agree, but in this case a good chunk of the cost of writing them will have already been paid in a way.

jerf 6 days ago

For people who aren't getting the value of unit tests, this is my intro to the idea. You had to do some sort of testing on your code. At its core, the concept of unit testing is just, what if instead of throwing away that code, you kept it?

To the extent that other concerns get in the way of the concept, like the general difficulty of testing that GUIs do what they are supposed to do, I don't blame the concept of unit testing; I blame the techs that make the testing hard.

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Ragnarork 6 days ago

I also think that this is a great way to emphasis their value.
If anything I'd only keep those if it's hard to write them, if people push back against it (and I myself don't like them sometimes, e.g. when the goal is just to push up the coverage metric but without actually testing much, which only add test code to maintain but no real testing value...).
Like any topic there's no universal truth and lots of ways to waste time and effort, but this specifically is extremely practical and useful in a very explicit manner: just fix it once and catch it the next time before production. Massively reduce the chance one thing has to be fixed twice or more.

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n144q 6 days ago

I can't count how many times when other people ask me "how can I use this API?", I just send a test case to them. Best example you can give to someone that is never out of sync.

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seanwilson 6 days ago

> Writing tests isn't free, I agree, but in this case a good chunk of the cost of writing them will have already been paid in a way.

Some examples that come to mind are bugs to do with UI interactions, visuals/styling, external online APIs/services, gaming/simulation stuff, and asynchronous/thread code, where it can be a substantial effort to write tests for, vs fixing the bug that might just be a typo. This is really different compared to if you're testing some pure functions that only need a few inputs.

It depends on what domain you're working in, but I find people very rarely mention how much work certain kinds of test can be to write, especially if there aren't similar tests written already and you have to do a ton of setup like mocking, factories, and UI automation.

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Ragnarork 6 days ago

Definitely agree with you on the fact that there are tests which are complicated to write and will take effort.
But I think all other things considered my impression still holds, and that I should maybe rather say they're easier to write in a way, though not necessarily easy.

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