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

多年来,我一直试图说服人们,他们需要为自己的代码编写单元测试。无论他们是先编写测试(如TDD)还是在编写功能之后,我总是试图向他们解释对代码进行单元测试的所有好处。几乎没有人反对我。你不能否认一些显而易见的事情,任何聪明的人都会看到单元测试和TDD的好处。

单元测试的问题在于它需要行为上的改变,而要改变人们的行为是非常困难的。用语言,你会让很多人同意你的观点,但你不会看到他们做事的方式有太多变化。

你必须通过行动来说服人们。你的个人成功会比你的争论吸引更多的人。如果他们看到你不只是在谈论单元测试或TDD,而是在做你鼓吹的事情,而且你是成功的,人们就会试图模仿你。

You should also take on a lead role because no one writes unit test right the first time, so you may need to coach them on how to do it, show them the way, and the tools available to them. Help them while they write their first tests, review the tests they write on their own, and show them the tricks, idioms and patterns you've learned through your own experiences. After a while, they will start seeing the benefits on their own, and they will change their behavior to incorporate unit tests or TDD into their toolbox.

改变不会在一夜之间发生,但只要有一点耐心,你就可能实现你的目标。

其他回答

Yes - Unit Testing is definitely worth the effort but you should know it's not a silver bullet. Unit Testing is work and you will have to work to keep the test updated and relevant as code changes but the value offered is worth the effort you have to put in. The ability to refactor with impunity is a huge benefit as you can always validate functionality by running your tests after any change code. The trick is to not get too hung up on exactly the unit-of-work you're testing or how you are scaffolding test requirements and when a unit-test is really a functional test, etc. People will argue about this stuff for hours on end and the reality is that any testing you do as your write code is better than not doing it. The other axiom is about quality and not quantity - I have seen code-bases with 1000's of test that are essentially meaningless as the rest don't really test anything useful or anything domain specific like business rules, etc of the particular domain. I've also seen codebases with 30% code coverage but the tests were relevant, meaningful and really awesome as they tested the core functionality of the code it was written for and expressed how the code should be used.

在探索新的框架或代码库时,我最喜欢的一个技巧是为“它”编写单元测试,以发现事物是如何工作的。这是一个学习新事物的好方法,而不是阅读枯燥的文档:)

当您手动测试软件时,通常会使用一小组测试/操作。最终,您将自动修改输入数据或操作,以便围绕已知问题进行导航。应该有单元测试来提醒您某些事情不能正常工作。

我建议在编写代码之前编写测试,添加新的测试/数据来改进主代码的功能!

当你说“我们的代码库不适合简单的测试”时,这是代码气味的第一个迹象。编写单元测试意味着您通常以不同的方式编写代码,以使代码更具可测试性。在我看来,这是一件好事,因为多年来我在编写代码时看到我必须为其编写测试,这迫使我提出更好的设计。

如果您现有的代码库本身不适合单元测试,并且它已经处于生产环境中,那么通过试图重构所有代码以使其具有单元可测试性,您可能会产生比解决更多的问题。

您最好将精力放在改进集成测试上。有很多代码在没有单元测试的情况下编写起来更简单,如果QA可以根据需求文档验证功能,那么就完成了。船。

在我的脑海中,最经典的例子就是嵌入到GridView的ASPX页面中的SqlDataReader。代码都在ASPX文件中。SQL位于存储过程中。你做什么单元测试?如果页面做了它应该做的事情,那么是否真的应该将其重新设计成几个层,以便实现自动化?

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。