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I prefer my unit tests to test everything all the way down. They already have that, that's called integration testing. Unit testing is trying to test as small

by azylman 14y ago

I prefer my unit tests to test everything all the way down. They already have that, that's called integration testing. Unit testing is trying to test as small of a unit of code as possible - this helps you identify exactly where the error is. If all of your tests are integration tests and something fails, you have no idea which part of your stack the problem is in. Obviously different projects require different kinds and amounts of test cases, but I prefer a mixture of both unit tests and integration tests (unit tests for small, complex blocks of logic, integration tests for most of the other stuff).

Silhouette 14y ago
If all of your tests are integration tests and something fails, you have no idea which part of your stack the problem is in. Not necessarily, because if you have a lot of integration tests then probably multiple ones will fail given a bug in a certain module, and the pattern of the failures might be all you need to locate the source of the problem. One of the most successful projects I ever worked on, in robustness/quality terms, didn't really have any unit tests at all, but it had a comprehensive suite of end-to-end test cases that could be run automatically. Many of those didn't (and couldn't) have an absolute true/false outcome, either, but looking at the results they generated and applying various heuristics developed from experience, they were remarkably useful for similar reasons to unit tests.