So – management is looking to do a push to move towards doing unit-testing in all the applications moving forward – and eventually get into full TDD/Continuous Integration/Automated build mode (I hope). At this point however we are just concerned about getting everyone developing apps moving forward using unit-testing. I’d like to just start with the basics.
I won’t lie – I’m by far no expert by any means in unit-testing, but I do have a good enough understanding to start the initiative with the basics, and allow us to grow togeather as a team. I’d really love to get some comments & critisism from all you experts on my plan of attack on this thing. It’s a team of about 10 developers in a small shop, which makes for a great opportunity to move forward with agile development methodologies and best practices.
First off – the team consists of mainly mid level developers with a couple of junior devs and one senior, all with minimal to no exposure to unit testing. The training will be a semi-monthly meeting for about 30-60 minutes each time (probably wind up running an hour long i’d guess, and maybe have them more often). We will continue these meetings until it makes sense to stop them to allow others to catch up with their own ‘homework’ and experience – but the push will always be on.
Anyway – here is my lesson plan I have come up with. Well, the first two at least. Any advice from your experts out there on the actual content or structure of the lessons, etc, would be great. Comments & Critisism greatly appreciated. Thanks very much.
I apologize if this is ‘too much’ to post in here or read through. I think this would be a great thread for SO users looking to get into unit testing in the first place as well. Perhaps you could just skip to the ‘lesson plans’ section – thanks again everyone.
CLIFF NOTES – I realize this post is incredibly long and ugly, so here is the cliff notes – Lesson 1 will be ‘hello world unit tests’ – Lesson 2 will be opening the solution to my most recent application, and showing how to apply each ‘hello world’ example in real life… Thanks so much everyone for the feedback you’ve given me so far.. just wantd to highlight the fact that lesson 2 is going to have real life production unit tests in it, since many suggested I do that when it was my plan from the begining =)
Unit Testing Lesson Plan
Overview
Why unit test? Seems like a bunch of extra work – so why do it?
• Become the master of your own destiny. Most of our users do not do true UATs, and unfortunately tend to do their testing once in production. With unit-tests, we greatly decrease risk associated with this, especially when we create enough test data and take into account as many top level inputs as we possibly can. While not being a ‘silver bullet’ that prevents all bugs – it is your first line of defense – a huge front line, comparable to that of the SB championship Giants.
• Unit-Testing enforces good design and architecture practices. It is ‘the violent psychopath who maintains your code and knows where you live’ so to say. You simply can’t write poor quality code that is well unit-tested
• How many times have you not refactored smelly code because you were too scared of breaking something? Automated testing remove this fear, makes refactoring much easier, in turn making code more readable and easier to maintain.
• Bottom line – maintenance becomes much easier and cheaper. The time spent writing unit tests might be costly now – but the time it saves you down the road has been proven time and time again to be far more valuable. This is the #1 reason to automate testing your code. It gives us confidence that allows us to take on more ambitious changes to systems that we might have otherwise had to reduce requirements on, or maybe even not take on at all.
Terminology Review
• Unit testing – testing the lowest level, single unit of work. E.G. – test all possible code paths that a single function can flow through.
• Integration testing – testing how your units work together. E.g. – run a ‘job’ (or series of function calls) that does a bunch of work, with known inputs – and then query the database at the end and assert the values are what you expect from those known inputs (instead of having to eye-ball a grid on a web page somewhere, e.g. doing a functional test).
• Fakes – a fake is a type of object whose purpose is to use for your testing. It allows you too easily not test code that you do not want to test. Instead of having to call code that you do not want – like a database call – you use a fake object to ‘fake’ that DB call and perhaps read the data from an XML/Excel file or a mocking framework.
o Mock – a type of fake to which you make assert statements against.
o Stub – a type of fake to which you use as placeholder code, so you can skip the database call, but do not make asserts against
Lessons
Lesson one – Hello Worlds
• Hello World unit test – I will create a ‘hello world’ console application that is unit tested. Will create this application on the fly during the meeting, showing the tools in Visual Studio 2008 (test-project, test tools toolbar, etc.) that we are going to use along the way while explaining what they do. This will have only a single unit-test. (OK, maybe I won’t create it ‘on the fly’ =), have to think about it more). Will also explain the Assert class and its purpose and the general flow of a unit-test.
• Hello World, a bit more complicated. Now our function has different paths/logical branches the code can flow through. We will have ~3 unit tests for this function. This will be a pre-written solution I make before the meeting.
• Hello World, dependency injection. (Not using any DI frameworks). A pre-written solution that builds off the previous one, this time using dependency injection. Will explain what DI is and show a sample of how it works.
• Hello World, Mock Objects. A pre-written solution that builds off the previous one, this time using our newly added DI code to inject a mock object into our class to show how mocking works. Will use NMock2.0 as this is the only one I have exposure to. Very simple example to just display the use of mock objects. (Perhaps put this one in a separate lesson?).
• Hello World, (non-automated) Integration Test. Building off the previous solution, we create an integration test so show how to test 2 functions together, or entire class together (perhaps put this one in a separate lesson?)
Lesson two – now we know the basics – how to apply this in real life?
• General overview of best practices
o Rule #1- Single Responsibility Principal. Single Responsibility Principal. Single Responsibility Principal. Facetiously stating that this is the single most important thing to keep in mind while writing your code. A class should have only one purpose; a function should do only one thing. The key word here is ‘unit’ test – and the SRP will keep your classes & functions encapsulated into units.
o Dependency Injection is your second best friend. DI allows you to ‘plug’ behavior into classes you have, at run time. Among other things, this is how we use mocking frameworks to make our bigger classes more easily testable.
o Always think ‘how will I test this’ as you are writing code. If it seems ‘too hard to test’, it is likely that your code is too complicated. Re-factor until it into more logical units of classes/functions – take that one class that does 5 things and turn it into 5 classes, one which calls the other 4. Now your code will be much easier to test – and also easier to read and refactor as well.
o Test behavior, not implementation. In nutshell, this means that we can for the most part test only the Public functions on our classes. We don’t care about testing the private ones (implementation), because the public ones (behavior) are what our calling code uses. For example… I’m a millionaire software developer and go to the Aston Martin dealership to buy myself a brand new DB9. The sales guy tells me that it can do 0-60 in 3 seconds. How would you test this? Would you lift the engine out and perform diagnostics tests, etc..? No… You would take it onto the parkway and do 160 MPH =). This is testing behavior vs. implementation.
• Reviewing a real life unit-tested application. Here we will go over each of the above ‘hello world’ examples – but the real life versions, using my most recent project as an example. I’ll open a simple unit test, a more complex one, one that uses DI, and one that uses Mocks (probably coupled to the DI one). This project is fairly small & simple so it is really a perfect fit. This will also include testing the DAL and how to setup a test database to run these tests against.
I helped design and run a Test Driven Development training in house at my company for Java developers. We ended up doing it as a full day training, and we broke it up similar to how you have here.
One thing I must stress though, is people need to learn by doing.
For my training, we set up a lab environment where each student could start with the same snapshot of code, and develop and run the tests themselves, with instructors walking around the training room helping individuals who were confused or weren’t getting it.
For the “Simple Example” we had a “cooking show” version of code that was on a projector and went through the TDD process step by step. Developers would have to go through the process of writing a test, then creating implementation that was just sufficient to pass the test, then repeat. At each phase, a prepared solution to the current phase was shown on the projector after the students had some time to try it on their own.
For the “Complex Example” we created a set of requirements, and then allowed the students to come up with their own solutions using TDD to do so. We even had an exercise where requirements surprise, surprise changed suddenly part way through the exercise.
I like your idea of doing it over a longer period of time with regular checkups. One downfall of our training was a lack of followup. Developers benefited by the training, I’m sure, but many I think, did not take the practice back to their ordinary work. Regular checkups would help instill unit testing as a matter of habit.
For more ideas, check out my answer to this question.