Weekly Journal : Testing

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it was not as easy to get programs right as we had thought. We had to discover debugging. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.  — Maurice Wilkes, 1949

Submitting Your Work

Submit a Markdown formatted plain text file, named week08_testing.md, to the journals folder of your individual portfolio_NETID repository provided for you in the course's Gitlab group.

Specification

Testing

As you program larger, more complex, projects it is vitally important, and some would say morally imperative, that you have confidence that the most basic aspects of your code works correctly based on automatically testing it (rather than manual, occasional, tests). Beyond that, testing is vitally important to producing real world software and, unless we begin to take software bugs seriously, our industry may need to become regulated. The good news is that like making readable, minimally well-designed code, is a matter of practicing to develop new habits.

• Describe how you currently test your code.
• What are common causes of the bugs/errors you make in your code?
• How has it been to incorporate automated testing into programming process? What has made it easy or hard to do?
• How has automated testing changed or improved your debugging process?
• How has automated testing changed or improved your willingness to refactor code?
• How do you assess the quality of a test? Provide an example of a good test.
• How easy or hard is it for you to come up with "sad" path tests for your code?
• How could you improve your testing process?

After answering the questions above, watch Bob Martin's video on the need for professionalism in coding and then answer the following questions:

• Why is it important to be able to easily and repeatably test your code?
• What other kinds of errors can you think of beyond basic functionality bugs?
• What ideas do you have about testing beyond Unit testing (hand writing specific inputs for individual methods)?