Sunday, August 5, 2007

Unit Test Analogies

Alex Miller has a recent post about an interesting analogy for unit tests.

This weekend, I remembered this gem. I did not come up with this quote. I read it somewhere years ago... If anyone can credit the source, please do so (I tried a quick Google search but no luck).

Checking code into source-control without unit-tests is like betting on a poker hand without looking at the cards. -- Anon.

4 comments:

  1. That's a pretty dumb analogy... Even if code is checked in without tests, the odds that they would be passing these tests are infinitely higher than receiving a very good poker hand.

    Go read "Leaking metaphors", by Joel Spolsky.

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  2. Dear Anonymous,

    Maybe you should take heed of another Joel blog post, where he referenced anonymous comments on blogs:

    "...followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words..."

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  3. Fine. My name is Steven Spencer. Happy?

    Are you taking me more seriously now?

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  4. Steven,

    I sense "blog entropy" but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

    I'm a big fan of Joel S. I looked for said piece but only found "The Law of Leaky Abstractions" which concerns implementations.

    I don't see how the quote really gets into odds/probabilities. The point is simply that both scenarios are much riskier than their respective alternatives.

    M.E.

    ReplyDelete