Skip to main content

Unit Tests fairy tale

By
A few weeks ago I had an interesting discussion with a college that is working in another company. I will try may a short summary of their story.

Why?
Because I was shocked to find out that…. unit tests are written only to give the team something to do.

THE story
They had to develop for one of their client a web application. They had a team of 4-5 people that worked on the project for 2 years and a half. In this period of time, they didn’t written NO unit tests.
After this period of time, the development part ended and monitoring and supported phase started. The team reduce two 2 people that started to make bug fixing, adding small new features. Things like that, normal tasks for this state of a software product.
Because the two members of the team didn’t had enough load a bright ideas came from the ‘God’.
When you don’t have issues or tasks in the queue, start writing unit test.
Of course, unit tests helped them to discover issues in the application. On top of this, they realize that a part of the system cannot be tested because deferent components are too coupled between each other and started to do refactoring.

Good/Bad parts
The good part is that they started in the end to add also unit tests to the system. This is a good thing, especially for that 2 developers. For them, that was the first moment when they realized that Unit Tests can help you, they are not only a waste of time.
On the other hand, even if you don’t cover all your code with unit tests, you should at least cover the most critical part of the system with unit tests.
Also I have a personal RULE that to follow all the time (backend):
When I have an issues or a bug in the system I will NEVER try to fix it until I did not replicate it using a unit test. 
Why? When you are able to reproduce a problem in a unit test, this means that you were able to isolate the use case, understand the problem and not the least REPRODUCE it in a controlled environment. This can be hard in a complex system but this is another story.

In conclusion I would like to say only one thing:
Write unit tests starting with development phase.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

By
After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(
Post a Comment
Read more

Azure AD and AWS Cognito side-by-side

By
In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, where we had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account. Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more. The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users.  This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users.  Feature Azure AD (B2C, B2C) AWS Cognito Access token lifetime Default 1h – the value is configurable 1h – cannot be modified
Post a Comment
Read more

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

By
Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see
8 comments
Read more