SJGP Software

This episode of Testing in the Trenches describes, with appropriate modifications to protect the parties involved, a situation I encountered on a client's project that challenged our efforts to create a suite of automated unit tests and what we did about it. It is adapted from one of the internal Tips that I regularly sent to the team. One of the key goals in unit testing is that we can run the suites of tests quickly. When the tests run in just a handful of seconds, we get fast feedback when issues arise. It is easier and safer to resolve those issues when the developer's mind is still on the problem they were working on. And tests that run quickly are less of a perceived interruption to the work of a test-averse developer. This increases the odds that the developer will adopt the practice of running the test suite before committing their code. But a run of tests comes to a complete halt when user interaction is required. For example, a path through the code that create...