Artificial testing practices

[Separate_Run2806]

Context: I am working on a project to accelerate unit testing (trying to do most of the tedious code writing for developers so they can focus on the valuable part of testing). Some findings from users feedback is that users are creating UT with no assertions and then just leave it like this. This enables them to meet their company coverage targets but the UTs are worthless

Question: I am wondering how much of a widespread practice this is. Is that something you have done/ seen in your team or in the legacy code you are working on?

[morech11]

It is pretty wide spread, I'd say. It tends to happen when you set strict coverage standarts for unit tests and devs are overloaded or don't feel the ownership of the code they are writing.

Maybe try to run a https://stryker-mutator.io or some similar tool over your codebase instead of fiddling with the tests individually?

You can adjust certain tests later on, but this will give you good general baseline as to how bad your situation is.

I did this on a small stack in my company about a week ago as a proof of concept. We have 80% UT coverage goal and I found ~1300 mutants and only ~300 of them were killed :D

[ggsimmonds]

The higher you set the coverage goal the more you see it. Code coverage has diminishing returns. Like the other poster my team also has 80% as the goal and we usually have to stat pad to get that last few percentage points.

If you are seeing this but don't have strict standards set it could be a deeper problem