我正致力于将单元测试集成到我所在团队的开发过程中,有一些人对此持怀疑态度。有什么好方法可以让团队中持怀疑态度的开发人员相信单元测试的价值?在我的具体情况下,我们将在添加功能或修复错误时添加单元测试。不幸的是,我们的代码库并不容易进行测试。


当前回答

根据我的经验,在复杂的软件环境中,单元测试和集成测试是“必须的”。

为了说服团队中的开发人员编写单元测试,您可能需要考虑在开发环境中集成单元测试回归分析(例如,在您的日常构建过程中)。

一旦开发人员知道如果单元测试失败,他们就不必花那么多时间调试它来发现问题,他们就会更有动力去编写这些测试。

这里有一个工具可以提供这样的功能:

单元测试回归分析工具

其他回答

单元测试的全部意义在于使测试变得简单。这是自动的。“make test”就完成了。如果您面临的问题之一是难以测试代码,那么这就是使用单元测试的最佳理由。

thetalkingwalnut问道: 有什么好方法可以让团队中持怀疑态度的开发人员相信单元测试的价值?

Everyone here is going to pile on lots of reasons out of the blue why unit testing is good. However, I find that often the best way to convince someone of something is to listen to their argument and address it point by point. If you listen and help them verbalize their concerns, you can address each one and perhaps convert them to your point of view (or at the very least, leave them without a leg to stand on). Who knows? Perhaps they will convince you why unit tests aren't appropriate for your situation. Not likely, but possible. Perhaps if you post their arguments against unit tests, we can help identify the counterarguments.

It's important to listen to and understand both sides of the argument. If you try to adopt unit tests too zealously without regard to people's concerns, you'll end up with a religious war (and probably really worthless unit tests). If you adopt it slowly and start by applying it where you will see the most benefit for the least cost, you might be able to demonstrate the value of unit tests and have a better chance of convincing people. I realize this isn't as easy as it sounds - it usually requires some time and careful metrics to craft a convincing argument.

单元测试是一种工具,就像任何其他工具一样,应该以这样一种方式进行应用,即收益(捕捉错误)大于成本(编写它们的工作)。如果它们没有意义,就不要使用它们,记住它们只是你工具库的一部分(例如检查、断言、代码分析器、形式化方法等)。我告诉开发者的是:

They can skip writing a test for a method if they have a good argument why it isn't necessary (e.g. too simple to be worth it or too difficult to be worth it) and how the method will be otherwise verified (e.g. inspection, assertions, formal methods, interactive/integration tests). They need to consider that some verifications like inspections and formal proofs are done at a point in time and then need to be repeated every time the production code changes, whereas unit tests and assertions can be used as regression tests (written once and executed repeatedly thereafter). Sometimes I agree with them, but more often I will debate about whether a method is really too simple or too difficult to unit test. If a developer argues that a method seems too simple to fail, isn't it worth taking the 60 seconds necessary to write up a simple 5-line unit test for it? These 5 lines of code will run every night (you do nightly builds, right?) for the next year or more and will be worth the effort if even just once it happens to catch a problem that may have taken 15 minutes or longer to identify and debug. Besides, writing the easy unit tests drives up the count of unit tests, which makes the developer look good. On the other hand, if a developer argues that a method seems too difficult to unit test (not worth the significant effort required), perhaps that is a good indication that the method needs to be divided up or refactored to test the easy parts. Usually, these are methods that rely on unusual resources like singletons, the current time, or external resources like a database result set. These methods usually need to be refactored into a method that gets the resource (e.g. calls getTime()) and a method that takes the resource as a argument (e.g. takes the timestamp as a parameter). I let them skip testing the method that retrieves the resource and they instead write a unit test for the method that now takes the resource as a argument. Usually, this makes writing the unit test much simpler and therefore worthwhile to write. The developer needs to draw a "line in the sand" in how comprehensive their unit tests should be. Later in development, whenever we find a bug, they should determine if more comprehensive unit tests would have caught the problem. If so and if such bugs crop up repeatedly, they need to move the "line" toward writing more comprehensive unit tests in the future (starting with adding or expanding the unit test for the current bug). They need to find the right balance.

重要的是要认识到单元测试并不是万能的,而且存在太多单元测试这样的事情。在我的工作场所,每当我们做一个经验教训,我不可避免地听到“我们需要写更多的单元测试”。管理层点头表示同意,因为“单元测试”==“好”这句话已经被灌输到他们的头脑中了。

However, we need to understand the impact of "more unit tests". A developer can only write ~N lines of code a week and you need to figure out what percentage of that code should be unit test code vs production code. A lax workplace might have 10% of the code as unit tests and 90% of the code as production code, resulting in product with a lot of (albeit very buggy) features (think MS Word). On the other hand, a strict shop with 90% unit tests and 10% production code will have a rock solid product with very few features (think "vi"). You may never hear reports about the latter product crashing, but that likely has as much to do with the product not selling very well as much as it has to do with the quality of the code.

Worse yet, perhaps the only certainty in software development is that "change is inevitable". Assume the strict shop (90% unit tests/10% production code) creates a product that has exactly 2 features (assuming 5% of production code == 1 feature). If the customer comes along and changes 1 of the features, then that change trashes 50% of the code (45% of unit tests and 5% of the production code). The lax shop (10% unit tests/90% production code) has a product with 18 features, none of which work very well. Their customer completely revamps the requirements for 4 of their features. Even though the change is 4 times as large, only half as much of the code base gets trashed (~25% = ~4.4% unit tests + 20% of production code).

我的观点是你必须传达你理解单元测试太少和太多之间的平衡——本质上你已经考虑了问题的两面。如果你能说服你的同事和/或你的管理层,你就获得了信誉,也许就有更好的机会赢得他们的信任。

One of the best things about unit testing is that your code will become easier to test as you do it. Preexisting code created without tests is always a challenge because since they weren't meant to be unit-tested, it's not rare to have a high level of coupling between classes, hard-to-configure objects inside your class - like an e-mail sending service reference - and so on. But don't let this bring you down! You'll see that your overall code design will become better as you start to write unit-tests, and the more you test, the more confident you'll become on making even more changes to it without fear of breaking you application or introducing bugs.

There are several reasons to unit-test your code, but as time progresses, you'll find out that the time you save on testing is one of the best reasons to do it. In a system I've just delivered, I insisted on doing automated unit-testing in spite of the claims that I'd spend way more time doing the tests than I would by testing the system manually. With all my unit tests done, I run more than 400 test cases in less than 10 minutes, and every time I had to do a small change in the code, all it took me to be sure the code was still working without bugs was ten minutes. Can you imagine the time one would spend to run those 400+ test cases by hand?

当涉及到自动化测试——无论是单元测试还是验收测试——每个人都认为编写可以手动完成的代码是浪费精力,有时这是真的——如果你计划只运行一次测试的话。自动化测试最好的部分是,您可以毫不费力地运行它们几次,并且在第二次或第三次运行之后,您所浪费的时间和精力已经得到了补偿。

最后一个建议是,不仅要对代码进行单元测试,还要先进行测试(详见TDD和BDD)。

测试驱动开发中经常被忽略的一个主要部分是可测试代码的编写。乍一看,这似乎是一种妥协,但您会发现可测试代码最终也是模块化的、可维护的和可读的。 如果你仍然需要说服别人,这是一个关于单元测试优点的简单演示。

这是非常以. net为中心的,但是有人尝试过Pex吗?

我非常怀疑,直到我尝试了——哇,多么精彩的表演。以前我想“我不会被这个概念说服,直到我明白它实际上对我有什么好处”。我只跑了一次就改变了主意,说:“我不在乎你怎么知道那里有致命异常的风险,但现在我知道我必须处理它”

也许这种行为唯一的缺点是它会标记所有事情,给你六个月的积压。但是,如果你有代码债,你总是有代码债,只是你不知道而已。告诉项目经理可能有20万个故障点,而你之前只知道有几十个,这是一个令人讨厌的前景,这意味着首先解释这个概念是至关重要的。