Home/ Questions/Q 7172839
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-28T15:41:58+00:00

I was going through ‘The Clean Coder’ by Bob Martin where i read about

  • 0

I was going through ‘The Clean Coder’ by Bob Martin where i read about the discipline to write test before any Production code.

However, TDD articles for asp.net in msdn show classes and method stubs being created and then unit tests were generated from those stubs.

I want to know whether I can write all unit tests before writing a single line of code in Business logic layer.

Edit: 1. My idea was to refactor to the extent where i change the entire class-relationship structure itself if needed. If i start from a stub then i would have to re-write the tests in case the class and method itself was wrong.

Edit: 2. Apart from that the thrust is on data-driven test, so if I use interfaces how would i write complete test where i have passed all the fields and since interfaces need to be generic i don’t think they’ll have all the properties. At best interfaces can have CRUD stub defined.

Thanks in Advance.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Sure you can. What’s stopping you?

    (Though typically, you would write one test at a time, rather than writing them all at once. Writing them all up-front smacks of Big Design Up Front, aka Waterfall. Part of the point of TDD is that you design as you go and refactor as needed, so you end up with something that’s only as complex as you actually need in order to satisfy your requirements — it helps you avoid YAGNI.)

    If you follow classic TDD principles, then you write a test to fail first, you run it and watch it fail, and only then do you write the necessary code to make it pass. (This helps make sure that there’s not a subtle error in your test.) And if you’re testing code that doesn’t exist yet, the first failure you expect is a compiler error.

    This is actually important. You’re testing code that doesn’t exist. Of course the compile should fail. If it doesn’t, then you need to find out why — maybe your tests aren’t actually being compiled, or maybe there’s already a class with the same name as the new one you’re thinking of writing, or something else you didn’t expect.

    There’s nothing stopping you from writing a non-compilable test first, and then going back and making it compile. (Just because Microsoft didn’t understand TDD when they wrote their testing tools doesn’t mean you can’t do it yourself.) The IDE might step on your toes a bit while you do (completing the names of existing classes instead of leaving the names you’re trying to write), but you quickly learn when to press Esc to deal with that.

    Visual Studio 2010 lets you temporarily switch Intellisense into a “test-first” mode, where it won’t step on your toes in this situation. But if you happen to use ReSharper, I don’t think they have that feature yet.

    • 0