Episode 11: Unit Testing Patterns

Guest: Gerard Meszaros

Host: Martin Lippert

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the agile methods community
to software development has been the practice of automated unit
testing: the writing of tests by programs that help to specify,
document, and verify the code in our systems. Automated unit tests
make possible other practices, such as refactoring and collective
code ownership, and they help us to ensure a high-level of qaulity
in our product.

Tests are great, but we must keep in mind that they are code, too.
The test suite grows over time, and without care we can run into
the same sort of problems with our tests that we encounter in our
code. Unlike production code, however, our tests sometimes feel
optional, in that the team might think it can stop writing and
maintaining tests when the perceived costs begin to exceed the
perceived benefits.

Gerard Meszaros, a developer and consultant with 25 years experience
in software and a nearly a decade of experience in agile methods,
wants to help teams avoid this calamity. He has documented his
understanding of unit test suites in a comprehensive set of patterns
for writing, monitoring, and maintaining test code.

In this regard, Meszaros will teach an ooPSLA
tutorial, titled

Unit Test Patterns and Smells:
Improving Test Code and Testability Through Refactoring.
This tutorial, presented as a case study, teaches the best practices
-- and "not so best practices" -- of unit testing as a set of patterns
and as a set of smells for recognizing when the suite is going astray.

Listen to this podcast to hear Martin Lippert of SE Radio talk
with Gerard about unit testing, the Nunit family of automated
test frameworks, and how to keep your test suites as clean and
valuable to you as your production code.