Unit Testing

Today I spent most of the day pairing on a task with another developer. This is unusual for our company (the usual arguments fears are raised) but we both found it a useful experience. Here's what I learned today.

As part of the pairing scenario, I suggested using a ping-pong test-first approach:

You may remember from my previous blog post on mocking frameworks that I'm a bit of a fan of this kind of tool. They're great for simplifying unit testing, and can also help guide you in to writing better, more loosely-coupled code via Dependency Injection.

One of the reasons progress on my web frameworks' evaluation has been so slow of late is that my last check-in broke my CCNET automated build, and, as the good programmer I am, I felt that this needed fixing before I made any more progress.

I'd written some unit tests for the PostController (good) that were accessing the database directly (bad), and for whatever reason the build machine couldn't successfully connect to the database. A classic case of "works on my machine!", and, as is usually the case with such things, a good example of poor design.