Unit Test Benefits, Goals and Stories

I recently came across an old entry on a Blog that outlined the stories that a consultant was using in introducing Unit Testing concepts and practices to a group of developers.

What a great idea! They are a concise list of driving principles, guiding his activities. They could be easily turned into some measurable benchmarks, milestones that indicate how far the team has come and how much more work the consultant still has.

I am envious. I began doing something similar - introducing Unit Testing to a group of developers - a couple years ago. I became the team's Unit Test Evangelist, championing the practice.

I had some benefits of unit testing that I wanted them to grasp and run with. But I did not take the time at the outset to clarify to myself or articulate to the team's management, exactly what we hoped to achieve.

And of course without knowing what you want to achieve, it becomes harder to know if you succeeded. How will you know you are there when you don't have a clear idea of where you are going?

An unspoken goal of mine was that the developers would see the benefits of automated unit tests, and would join me in improving our software by creating, running and maintaining them. What were the benefits I sought to persuade them with?

In my experience, some of the key benefits of Unit Testing are:
• Unit Tests find future bugs;
• Unit Tests increase your confidence in the code you are creating;
• Unit Tests save time by reducing the amount of repetitive manual testing needed;
• Unit Tests save time by preventing future debug sessions;
• Unit Tests document expected behavior;
• Unit Tests shorten the feedback loop, allowing fixes to come when the sub-domain is freshest in mind;
• Unit Tests drive better design;
• Unit Tests make changing existing code safer;

More than two years after introducing the concepts to this team, I would judge my success as middling at best. Again, with no a priori goals and measurables, that is difficult to assess. I will save my thoughts on why the results have been a little disappointing, and what I might do differently both from now on and another time, for another post.

Git Reset in Eclipse

Using Git and the Eclipse IDE, you have a series of commits in your branch history, but need to back up to an earlier version. The Git Reset feature is a powerful tool with just a whiff of danger, and is accessible with just a couple clicks in Eclipse. In Eclipse, switch to the History view. In my example it shows a series of 3 changes, 3 separate committed versions of the Person file. After commit 6d5ef3e, the HEAD (shown), Index, and Working Directory all have the same version, Person 3.0.

Scala Collections: A Group of groupBy() Examples

Scala provides a rich Collections API. Let's look at the useful groupBy() function. What does groupBy() do? It takes a collection, assesses each item in that collection against a discriminator function, and returns a Map data structure. Each key in the returned map is a distinct result of the discriminator function, and the key's corresponding value is another collection which contains all elements of the original one that evaluate the same way against the discriminator function. So, for example, here is a collection of Strings: val sports = Seq ("baseball", "ice hockey", "football", "basketball", "110m hurdles", "field hockey") Running it through the Scala interpreter produces this output showing our value's definition: sports: Seq[String] = List(baseball, ice hockey, football, basketball, 110m hurdles, field hockey) We can group those sports names by, say, their first letter. To do so, we need a disc

Java 8: Rewrite For-loops using Stream API

Java 8 Tip: Anytime you write a Java For-loop, ask yourself if you can rewrite it with the Streams API. Now that I have moved to Java 8 in my work and home development, whenever I want to use a For-loop, I write it and then see if I can rewrite it using the Stream API. For example: I have an object called myThing, some Collection-like data structure which contains an arbitrary number of Fields. Something has happened, and I want to set all of the fields to some common state, in my case "Hidden"

How to do Git Rebase in Eclipse

This is an abbreviated version of a fuller post about Git Rebase in Eclipse. See the longer one here : One side-effect of merging Git branches is that it leaves a Merge commit. This can create a history view something like: The clutter of parallel lines shows the life spans of those local branches, and extra commits (nine in the above screen-shot, marked by the green arrows icon). Check out this extreme-case history: http://agentdero.cachefly.net/unethicalblogger.com/images/branch_madness.jpeg Merge Commits show all the gory details of how the code base evolved. For some teams, that’s what they want or need, all the time. Others may find it unnecessarily long and cluttered. They prefer the history to tell the bigger story, and not dwell on tiny details like every trivial Merge-commit. Git Rebase offers us 2 benefits over Git Merge: First, Rebase allows us to clean up a set of local commits before pushing them to the shared, central repository. For this

Code Coverage in C#.NET Unit Tests - Setting up OpenCover

The purpose of this post is to be a brain-dump for how we set up and used OpenCover and ReportGenerator command-line tools for code coverage analysis and reporting in our projects. The documentation made some assumptions that took some digging to fully understand, so to save my (and maybe others') time and effort in the future, here are my notes. Our project, which I will call CEP for short, includes a handful of sub-projects within the same solution. They are a mix of Web APIs, ASP MVC applications and Class libraries. For Unit Tests, we chose to write them using the MSTest framework, along with the Moq mocking framework. As the various sub-projects evolved, we needed to know more about the coverage of our automated tests. What classes, methods and instructions had tests exercising them, and what ones did not? Code Coverage tools are conveniently built-in for Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Edition, but not for our Professional Edition installations. Much less for any Commun

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