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As a matter of fact I do think unit tests generally cause more harm than good. They are great for libraries with well defined and slowly evolving interfaces. B
by hbrn 4y ago
As a matter of fact I do think unit tests generally cause more harm than good.
They are great for libraries with well defined and slowly evolving interfaces. But unless you're doing open-source, you will rarely work on those.
Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration.
https://kentcdodds.com/blog/write-tests https://kentcdodds.com/blog/write-tests
- quantified 4y agoAny internal library used by multiple other teams has friction on its evolution and refactoring, and don't change interfaces all that much. Perhaps this turns into another round of clarifying what the discussion participants deem "unit" vs "integration".
- hbrn 4y agoEvery company is different, but my preference is to break into teams by domain/network boundary. In this case sharing libraries is extremely rare. Teams could easily be on different tech stacks. Edit: my experience is mostly between seed - series B startups. If you're Google, then of course you're going to have a ton of internal libraries. But I'd put it in the same category as open source.
- PaulHoule 4y agoOne role of tests is documentation. If you have a large number of examples of how to use an API you know they keep working. Any code snippet used for documentation should have a corresponding test because otherwise the docs will probably break someday. It’s the best case for ‘literate programming’ that there is.