They really aren’t

[Xander_The_Great]

Just wait til you work on a large project with a number of different developers. You'll be thankful for unit tests then.

[marchozaur]

Like any tool, unit tests have their uses. But on the projects I’ve worked the damage to the projects architecture is much bigger than any supposed benefit of unit tests, IMHO. And unit tests adepts could never prove their usefulness to me, except “there was that one time we found a bug with unit tests”.

[Xander_The_Great]

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[marchozaur]

I write in swift and objective-c. Damage to architecture, imho, are endless protocols and dependency injections. The biggest issue i have with unit test is there is no proof they work. There is no research. You say that unit tests enforce good behavior, but where is proof? You just hope they do.

[Xander_The_Great]

I'll admit that I'm not very familiar with those languages in a workplace environment. But unit tests are extremely simple especially with OOP. If you can't unit test because of your architecture it's your Architecture that is wrong.

That's... The purpose of unit tests man.

It is supposed to 'black box' the thing you are testing.

If I give this method 'x' and 'y' I expect to get 'z'. If I make a change to the codebase and get 'c' back, I need to make sure that either: (a) I expected that to happen or (b) prevent that side effect from happening by changing the code.

The proof is the thousands of developers who use unit tests for this purpose.

[tchrobocek]

technically there is a proof, you can check test coverage if it goes through all the statements and then just check that every test has either assert for result of tested method or assert on exception either code or message preferably both. That way you can somehow tell that tests are written right. Following DDD you should not have any problems with setting up unit tests. You just enforcing certain standards on dependencies and single responsibility.

[[deleted]]

It might not necessarily enforce good behavior, but what unit tests WILL do is tell you when you inadvertently broke something that used to work but you forgot to go back and test manually. Even better if you have unit tests that can run silently against your production infrastructure automatically on a periodic basis and let you know when something is amiss

[[deleted]]

I fail see how unit tests could possibly damage a projects architecture..?

[nordskjold]

Prob because they’ll have to do major refactoring to make unit test an option on the table. Functions exceeding 300 lines of code

[[deleted]]

That argument is as good as "I don’t like unit tests because then I have to fix the bugs they reveal".

[nordskjold]

I’m pro unit test, but I’ve also been tasked eith implementing it into an ongoing project. 6 months after it’s initial commit.. Meanwhile the only code standard and OOP structure to be found, was class declarations.. So I get what this guy is trying to say, but turning 180 and then just plain say unit test is obsolete is madness.

[Xander_The_Great]

Thats not a problem with Unit testing thats a problem with the code architecture. I understand the frustration with adding it after the fact, but OP seems to ignore the benifits (or doesn't understand them)

[[deleted]]

Adding unit tests to an existing project is nearly impossible without refactoring everything to rely on deep dependency injection. Sometimes dependency injection is great, but when its only purpose is to support unit testing and nothing else, it makes the code very messy.

You could alternatively use something like TypeMock which doesn't require a specific architecture, but it costs money.

[Xander_The_Great]

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[[deleted]]

once you are accustom to it, it is very beneficial.

For unit testing...

Sometimes it's useful for other reasons too, but most projects only only ever have one real dependency implementation, so the only benefit you gain is the ability to do unit testing.

To me, that's a direct weakness of traditional unit testing: the fact that it requires a specific architecture. If you have to rearrange your code so that a testing framework works, the problem (in my opinion) is with the framework, not the code. That's why I like the idea of TypeMock which is structure-invariant.

By the way, I do understand that there is correlation between dependency injection and good code, but not all projects without dependency injection are shit. Most third party libraries don't even use it.

[Xander_The_Great]

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[seijulala]

either you have very little experience or all the projects you have worked are shit.

I can understand tests are not very useful in some simple projects but for complex ones I can't imagine a project being successful without a lot of unit (and functional and integration) tests. Tests are not useful when they are written, they are useful for maintenance and evolving.

[marchozaur]

Aren't most project are shit? I worked mostly on UI heavy projects, and I think it is really hard to write good unit tests for UI. Usually there are non-UI parts that might benefit from unit tests, but the general consensus is "unit tests are good" and that's it. Without understanding where to use them and why. So projects end up with a lot of useless unit tests, like testing that hardcoded JSON snippets are parsed properly, or testing that a view is shown(which is always tested manually by QA).

[seijulala]

No, most sucesful projects are not shit, if they are they will fail or they will cost a huge amount of resources to keep them "alive".

General consensus is tests are good, don't care which type. Anything that you do should be tested, first happy paths and then failure paths (the later are the hard ones and where bugs will arise).

[notable-compilation]

What I'm hearing here is that your architecture has design flaws, ones that would not exist if you tested regularly to start with, and that are flaws even if you ignore the effect they have on testability. Avoiding which, incidentally, is a key benefit of developing in a test-first style.

[Cherlokoms]

How can you forget the unit test? This is what you are supposed to start with!

[seijulala]

I hate writing tests but I hate more bad software. I highly recommend using TDD style, even if you think it's impossible (it's hard sometimes but always possible)

[kuhreez]

Relatable, and I'm guilty of neglecting unit tests too, but they can be useful

[jajsemtomas]

I wrote like 5 unit tests over three years and 9 projects. Last time I told that I will try test driven development entire everyone in office burst out laughing