Question

I’m new to test driven development and first time I’m tring to use it in a simple project.

I have a class, and I need to test creation, insertion and deletion of objects of this class. If I write three seperate test functions I need to duplicate initialization codes in other function. On the hand if I put all tests in one test function then it is a contradiction with one test per function. What should I do?

Here the situation:

tst_create()
{
   createHead(head);
   createBody(body);
   createFoot(foot);
}

tst_insert()
{
   createHead(head);
   createBody(body);
   createFoot(foot);

   obj_id=insert(obj); //Also I need to delete obj_id somehow in order to preserve old state
}

tst_delete()
{
   createHead(head);
   createBody(body);
   createFoot(foot);

   obj_id=insert(obj); 

   delete(obj_id);
}

vs

tstCreateInsertDelete()
{
   createHead(head);
   createBody(body);
   createFoot(foot);

   obj_id=insert(obj);

   delete(obj_id);
}

Answer 1

Factor out the duplication in your tests.

Depending on your test framework, there may be support for defining a setup method that’s called before each test execution and a teardown method that’s called after each test.

Regardless, you can extract the common stuff so that you only have to repeat a call to a single shared setup.

If you tell us what language and test framework you use, we might be able to give more specific advice.