I hope this isn’t too extremely obvious, but I found that I had to take a step back and re-examine my unit tests to find this simple improvement to speed up my unit tests.
When I wrote about how I’m hooked on test-driven development (TDD), the example in that post was too simple and time savings are not noticed. However, let’s dive in to something a little deeper where we have a full class to test oppose to a single internal function.
I’ve only been doing TDD for a few weeks, but I’m completely sold. I don’t want to go back! I’ll be honest though, it hasn’t been easy. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve wasted time, but I’m really starting to reap the benefits.
I’ve always thought I was a good developer. I write decent code and it works mostly as expected. It took me many years into my career before I wrote my first unit test. It always fell into the category of too time consuming or expensive. Oh the irony!
As I started learning how to write to unit tests, I always found myself rewriting things I already did just to get them to be unit tested; how frustrating! A unit test that should have only took a few minutes, ended up taking a really long time because the code had to be refactored just to be tested. No better way to turn you off from unit testing.
Enter test-driven development…