From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2003-05-17T02:49:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Test::Unit sequencing

On Sat, 17 May 2003 00:27:33 +0900, Michael Campbell wrote:
> I know this is wrought with exceptions, but a very crude rule of
> thumb is that if your code is not easily testable, it's probably
> poorly designed, too tightly coupled, not cohesive enough, too
> big, etc.; in other words, due for a re-think.

I would strongly disagree with this. There are some things that
aren't really able to be broken into clean units for testing. Two of
the projects I'm working on right now are difficult to unit test.
Both of them are involved with creating and manipulating documents
that are intended to be dealt with by other programs. In general,
the documents have to be completely correct, or they aren't valid at
all.

There are bits that can be tested unit-wise, but they're smaller
than you might imagine. Neither of these things can be cleanly unit
tested.

I realised that you noted that there are exceptions, but I don't
think that it's a safe categorisation at all.

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2003.05.16 at 13:33:35