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。

单元测试的一个好处是，它们可以作为说明代码行为方式的文档。好的测试有点像参考实现，团队成员可以通过查看它们来了解如何将他们的代码与您的代码集成。

你想说服谁?工程师还是经理?如果你试图说服你的工程师同事，我认为你最好的办法是迎合他们的愿望，让他们做出高质量的软件。有许多研究表明，它能发现漏洞，如果他们关心做好工作，这对他们来说就足够了。

如果您试图说服管理层，您将很可能不得不做一些成本/收益推理，说明未检测到的缺陷的成本大于编写测试的成本。一定要把不可转化的成本也包括在内，比如失去客户的信心等等。

Unit testing helps a lot in projects that are larger than any one developer can hold in their head. They allow you to run the unit test suite before checkin and discover if you broke something. This cuts down a lot on instances of having to sit and twiddle your thumbs while waiting for someone else to fix a bug they checked in, or going to the hassle of reverting their change so you can get some work done. It's also immensely valuable in refactoring, so you can be sure that the refactored code passes all the tests that the original code did.

我在几年前发现了TDD，从那时起我就使用它编写了所有我喜欢的项目。我估计，TDD一个项目所花费的时间与牛仔式地组合一个项目所花费的时间大致相同，但我对最终产品的信心增加了，以至于我忍不住有一种成就感。

我还觉得它改进了我的设计风格(更面向界面，以防我需要一起模拟东西)，而且，正如顶部的绿色帖子所写的，它有助于“编码便秘”:当你不知道接下来要写什么，或者你有一个令人生畏的任务摆在你面前时，你可以写小一点的。

最后，我发现到目前为止，TDD最有用的应用是在调试中，如果仅仅因为您已经开发了一个询问框架，那么您就可以用它来刺激项目以可重复的方式产生错误。

在我们的办公室里，每天都有这样的对话:

“伙计，我就是喜欢单元测试，我刚刚能够对某些东西的工作方式进行了一系列更改，然后能够通过再次运行测试来确认我没有破坏任何东西……”

细节每天都在变化，但情绪却不变。单元测试和测试驱动开发(TDD)有很多隐藏的和个人的好处，也有很多明显的好处，除非他们自己做，否则你无法真正向他们解释。

但是，忽略这一点，下面是我的尝试!

Unit Tests allows you to make big changes to code quickly. You know it works now because you've run the tests, when you make the changes you need to make, you need to get the tests working again. This saves hours. TDD helps you to realise when to stop coding. Your tests give you confidence that you've done enough for now and can stop tweaking and move on to the next thing. The tests and the code work together to achieve better code. Your code could be bad / buggy. Your TEST could be bad / buggy. In TDD you are banking on the chances of both being bad / buggy being low. Often it's the test that needs fixing but that's still a good outcome. TDD helps with coding constipation. When faced with a large and daunting piece of work ahead writing the tests will get you moving quickly. Unit Tests help you really understand the design of the code you are working on. Instead of writing code to do something, you are starting by outlining all the conditions you are subjecting the code to and what outputs you'd expect from that. Unit Tests give you instant visual feedback, we all like the feeling of all those green lights when we've done. It's very satisfying. It's also much easier to pick up where you left off after an interruption because you can see where you got to - that next red light that needs fixing. Contrary to popular belief unit testing does not mean writing twice as much code, or coding slower. It's faster and more robust than coding without tests once you've got the hang of it. Test code itself is usually relatively trivial and doesn't add a big overhead to what you're doing. This is one you'll only believe when you're doing it :) I think it was Fowler who said: "Imperfect tests, run frequently, are much better than perfect tests that are never written at all". I interpret this as giving me permission to write tests where I think they'll be most useful even if the rest of my code coverage is woefully incomplete. Good unit tests can help document and define what something is supposed to do Unit tests help with code re-use. Migrate both your code and your tests to your new project. Tweak the code till the tests run again.

我参与的很多工作都没有很好地进行单元测试(web应用程序用户交互等)，但即使如此，我们在这个商店里都被测试感染了，当我们把测试束缚住时，我们最高兴。我怎么极力推荐这种方法都不为过。