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An example of bad test, part 1

Let us take a look at this test. When I saw it, the test cried out in pain to me: "Help me, I am so overworked."

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This test is doing far too much. I drew the battle line on the test, just to give you a clear indication on what is going on.

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What we are asserting are things that have nothing to do with what the test is supposed to test.This is also the classic "A test should have a single assertion" example, I think.

The test pass by side effect. It will actually be a problem down the line.

Print | posted on Sunday, August 17, 2008 5:39 AM

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# re: An example of bad test, part 1 8/17/2008 6:03 AM Rob Conery

Ayende this is a spike, as I mentioned about 5 times on my blog and in the video. I understand the issue you're having here - I just wanted to see if it would work. It did...

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# re: An example of bad test, part 1 8/17/2008 6:11 AM Rob Conery

Also - it's worth mentioning that I have no idea how to unit test something that is fired in an asynch way. In other words, WWF uses the WorflowRuntime, which is off on its own thread. I have a race condition in this code but believe it or not - the result came in :) and I was happy.

Now that said - what I could do is start and then stop the runtime - wait for it, and then see what the status of the order is... thoughts?

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# re: An example of bad test, part 1 8/17/2008 6:19 AM Ayende Rahien

Rob,
Just to clarify.
Spike code has no standards, agreed.
It just turned out to be a good example to show bad testing practices.

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# re: An example of bad test, part 1 8/17/2008 6:20 AM Ayende Rahien

Testing async code is tough.
ManualResetEvent is the common case.

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# re: An example of bad test, part 1 8/18/2008 12:34 PM IVR

Well, it looks like C#, is it?

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