Testivus, Testability and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
July 1st, 2010 | Published in Google Testing
by Alberto Savoia
Note: Apparently, there were lots of downloads of the Testivus booklet and I hit some kind of quota on my personal account. If you have problems with reaching the original link below, please try this new download link or this one.
A major topic at this year's GTAC conference is going to be testability: "We also want to highlight methodologies and tools that can be used to build testability into our products." That's great!
Testability is one of the most important, yet overlooked, attributes of code – and one that is not discussed enough. That's unfortunate, because by the time the issue of testability comes up in a project it's usually too late. As preparation and seeding for GTAC, I though it would be fun and useful to get some discussions on testability going. So here we go, feel free to chime in with your thoughts.
A few years ago, after watching one too many episodes of Kung Fu, I was inspired to write a pretentious and cryptic little booklet about testing called "The Way of Testivus" (PDF).
Testivus addresses the issue of testability in a few places, but I would like to start the discussion with this maxim:
To me, "Think of code and tests as one" is the very foundation of testability. If you don't think about testing as you design and implement your code, you are very likely to make choices that will impair testability when the time comes. This position seemed obvious and non-controversial to me at the time I wrote it, and I still stand by it. Most people seem to agree with it as well, and more than one person told me that it's their favorite and most applicable maxim from all of Testivus. There are however three groups of people who found issue with it.
Some of the people, mostly from the TDD camp, think that my choice of words leaves too much wiggle room: "Thinking about the tests is not enough, they should be writing and running those tests at the same time."
Others think that code and tests should not be thought of as one at all, but they should be treated independently – ideally as adversaries: "I don't want code and tests to be too "friendly". Production code should not be changed or compromised to make the testing easier, and tests should not trust the hooks put in the code to make it more testable." Most of the people in this camp are not big fans of unit/developer testing in the first place, but not all. One person, a believer in developer testing, told me that he gets the best results with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde approach. He assumes two different roles and personalities based on whether he's coding or testing his own code. When coding, he's the constructive Dr. Jekyll who focuses on elegant and efficient design and algorithms – and does not worry about testability. When testing, he turns into the destructive Mr. Hyde; he tries to forget that it's his code or how he implemented it, and puts all his energy and anger into trying to break it. Sounds like it could work quite well – though I don't think I'd want this person as an office mate during the Mr. Hyde phase.
A third group, thought that the maxim was fine for unit tests, but not applicable to other types of tests that were best served by an adversarial black-box approach.
What are your thoughts? Is it enough to think about testability when designing or writing the code, or must you actually write and run some tests in parallel with the code? Does anyone agree with the position that code and tests should be designed and developed in isolation? Are there other Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes out there?
Alberto