我曾多次尝试单元测试，我仍然相信，考虑到我的情况，这是值得的。

我开发网站，其中很多逻辑涉及在数据库中创建、检索或更新数据。当我为了单元测试的目的而尝试“模拟”数据库时，它变得非常混乱，似乎有点毫无意义。

当我围绕业务逻辑编写单元测试时，从长远来看它从未真正帮助过我。因为我主要独自从事项目工作，我倾向于直观地知道哪些代码区域可能会受到我所从事的工作的影响，并且我手动测试这些区域。我希望尽可能快地向客户交付解决方案，而单元测试通常看起来是浪费时间。我列出了手动测试，并亲自完成它们，并在执行过程中标记它们。

我可以看到，当一个开发团队在一个项目中工作并互相更新代码时，这可能是有益的，但即使这样，我认为如果开发人员具有高质量，良好的沟通和编写良好的代码通常就足够了。

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。

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。

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)。

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。

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:)