Hi List, a while back we briefly discussed (http://lists.amdatu.org/pipermail/amdatu-developers/2010-October/000025.html) the need for unit/integration testing and coverage measurement. At this point we have a (kind of shaky) pax itest suite without coverage measurement, about 26755 loc covered by no more then 52 junit test and no policy/guidelines on the matter. This deeply concerns me and after doing some refactorring on code not under junit test for AMDATU-263 I thought it time to reopen this discussion and at least come to a documented consensus/guideline.
Not going to re-itterate on the rationale for unit testing or the difference in purpose, scope and applicability between unit and integration testing. I think unit testing is good (to an extend) for the numerous reasons documented all around the web and is especially valuable to a fine grained component/service model such as ours where any particular integration most probably only tests a subset of the lower level use cases of a unit. At the sometime you can allready observe how heavy the itest suite is becoming and I think it is unreasonble for a developer to have to rely on executing it fully each dev cycle to convince him/herselve that a local refactor does not violate the basic contract of the unit. Even now when it is still possible to do it on a local machine which may very well may change at some point due to external integrations (cloud / Iaas / etc). Therefore I'd like to propose that we complement our guidelines with a 'unit test unless' policy. it should roughly say that all (business) code must have a reasonable degree of coverage, eg 75% and IMHO even basic service lifecycle (but I may be overplaying my hand here). It's easy, its light weight, its invaluable (literaly) on a large codebase... its common sense! I know there are some different opinions on the matter but I'd like to here them all, discuss them and come to a policy because if we do not implement a guideline now we will never be able go back and deal with it for these rest of the codebase lifecycle. WDYT Bram
