Building good unit tests is a lot harder than it sounds. Designing Developer Tests is a very nice introduction to the art.
Got a good quotation in it, too: The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair. - Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Posted to Software development by Simon Brunning at March 10, 2004 04:44 PMSome of this is covered in Kent Beck's Test-Driven Development and you kind of get 'for free' if you develop this way. I've not read all of "Designing Developer Tests", but what I have read is a little dry and would benifit from some code examples. By comparison Beck probably goes too far the other way...
I'm ashamed to say that my Software Engineering degree didn't cover testing in any great detail at all - that said, my lectures didn't understand what use a core dump was and thought debuggers were useless. My course was an example of "Those who can't, teach" in action if you ask me.
Posted by: Sam Newman on March 10, 2004 05:09 PMSoftware Engineering degree? I did metalwork. ;-)
Posted by: Simon Brunning on March 10, 2004 05:22 PM