Category Archives: TAD

TDD’s Impact on Testers

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As programmers adopt test-driven development, they are going to prevent many defects that would have escaped to testers. Programmers that write unit tests just after programming are going to find many of the defects that would have escaped. Keep in mind that the programmer tests only check what the programmer thinks the code is supposed to do. The tests do not assure the code meets the customers’ needs. But making sure the code is doing what the programmer thinks it is supposed to do is needed for high quality systems. They work on purpose, rather than by the accident of offsetting defects.

Testers, and the whole team, are responsible for making sure the product does what they think the customer needs. These are different tests, they cover more code per test as well as checking the interactions between modules. As testers adopt automated testing, they need different skills than the manual tester that is following a script or exploring. Some adopt Acceptance Test Driven Development. For testers in this environment, the world is changing. Changing for the better with the intellectual challenges of automation, keeping the cost of retest low, and reducing the repetitive, error prone and boring manual tests. Not all manual tests go away, but we work to automate what is repetitive. In addition ATDD moves testers upstream from reacting to the code written to specifying system behavior by example.

All that said, most of the world of software development still practices Debug Later Programming and manual test, the same practices I used in my first job as a programmer. Congratulations for using 1979 programming techniques! We’ve learned a lot since then.

For some adopting TDD and ATDD is changing their world. For most it is not. There is so much legacy code out there, as well as people and organizations that do not know how or why to automate their tests, that the status quo of testing will likely have a long life.

Accessing static Data and Functions in Legacy C — Part 2

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Maybe you read Part 1 of this article. If you did you’ll know it concerns adding tests to legacy code (legacy code is code without tests). You will also know that the code has file scope functions and data that we want to test directly.

My opinion on accessing private parts of well designed code, is that you do not need to. You can test well design code through its public interface. Take it as a sign that the design is deteriorating when you cannot find a way to fully test a module through its public interface.

Part 1 showed how to #include the code under test in the test file to gain access to the private parts, a pragmatic thing to do when wrestling untested code into a test harness. This article shows another technique that may have an advantage for you over the technique shown in Part 1. Including the code under test in a test case can only be done once in a test build. What if you need access to the hidden parts in two test cases? You can’t. That causes multiple definition errors at link time.

This article shows how to create a test access adapter to overcome that problem.
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Test Before or Test After, that is the Question

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In Jeff Langr’s blog, Jeff responded to an assertion (from someone Jeff calls Schmoo) that writing tests after developing a unit of production code takes less time than using TDD to create production code and its tests. For starters, I am happy the discussion is about when to write the unit tests and not if.

I think a model would help us talk about this issue. It would be great to have some real numbers in the model; that will be hard. But for starters let’s look at a model. Maybe then someone can figure out how to put some numbers to the model.
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