On Jan 9, 2008 7:26 AM, Richard Conroy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 8, 2008 7:14 PM, Daniel Tenner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Might be a personal thing, but my approach is that I try to test the > > public behaviour of the object. Testing private methods is, imho, > > getting dangerously close to specifying how the object does its > > business, rather than what it does. > > > > I would just spec the externally visible behaviour, where it occurs, > > and let the object implement it as it wants (using private methods or > > any other mechanism). > > The trouble is that this makes it very difficult to get effective coverage. > There is usually a lot more setup involved. If your tests are more expensive > to write, because you are unit testing indirectly through public methods, > less testing will get done,
If you live by the rule of "never write a line of code except to get a failing example to pass," then you should always have 100% coverage implicitly. If you're back-filling that's a different story, but then we're not talking about BDD anymore. I'm not saying that I will never test private methods, but it's something that should be rare and avoided. FWIW, David > and worse tests can end up getting very brittle. > > I do like the idea though of during the unit test itself, you unseal the > method. > You get the best of both worlds. > > _______________________________________________ > rspec-users mailing list > rspec-users@rubyforge.org > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users > _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
