undefined | Better HN

0 pointsiofj10y ago0 comments

> As others have said, you test inputs and outputs (and maybe you need to test some failure modes depending on the complexity of the situation). When you're working on a parser, or lexical analyzer of any sort, wouldn't it be nice to know that it is capable of parsing what you thought it should?

That would be a system test. Nobody would write a parser in one function, so it's full functionality can't be tested in a unit test. This is also exactly the sort of test I'm advocating. The thing I'll guarantee you though : it won't provide 100% code coverage.

Unit tests are this kind of crap, testing trivial things 100 times. You immediately see why they provide 100% code coverage : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_testing#Design

> the more brittle and difficult you make it to track down the cause of test failures

Yes ! This of course happens because they find ever-more subtle bugs, not because there's something wrong with the test.

0 comments

bluejekyll10y ago

> it won't provide 100% code coverage.

Yeah. 100% coverage is BS, again I go back to proof of quality.

> because the find ever-more subtle bugs

Well, yes and no. Yes integration tests are important for finding subtle bugs between different components of a larger system. No, bc an over-reliance on these instead of proper unit-testing, you end up with code bloat in your integration tests, and a maintenance nightmare because the tests are more complex. On top of that because you have so many integration tests It becomes unclear when the integration test is testing a valid API construct, vs something internal, making it very difficult to refactor code because you don't know what's expected API response vs some odd internal bug that you had to test for bc you didn't have a good unit test for the internals.