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Just like Agile unit tests came about as a fashion. I think the history is a bit murky but Kent Beck was one of the proponents and he also happens to be one of
by YZF 4y ago
Just like Agile unit tests came about as a fashion. I think the history is a bit murky but Kent Beck was one of the proponents and he also happens to be one of the signatories on the Agile Manifesto. Let's say circa 1997.
There was plenty of very well written software in existence at that point. Large applications, operating systems, databases, games, embedded applications etc. etc.
That's not to say there's anything bad about unit tests just like there's nothing bad about the Agile principles. They don't prove your code works though, that's not really possible. A useful tool- sure.
- astrange 4y agoThere are bad things about unit tests compared to any other way of getting test coverage. You have to make your architecture more complex to allow them - people call this “testable” and pretend dependency injection and other weird ways of avoiding straightforward code are good. And they rarely fail and have to be maintained. It might be good to write them as you’re bringing up new code, but deleting the useless ones after that could be an improvement.
- ironman1478 4y agoWell written by what metric? How are you evaluating that? And how do those software systems compare in complexity to what is being developed today?
- YZF 4y agoHonestly- subjectively. Does the software crash often, do I see weird behaviour as a user, what's the number of users, bug report rates. I think those systems do compare in complexity to at least pieces of todays software. A lot of this older code is still powering things today/morphed into newer/larger systems. I've worked in more recent times on software that was used by millions of people, was extremely reliable, and didn't have a lot of unit tests. We did have other forms of automated testing though.