Virtuous Code - Latest Comments in Testing Private Methods

Re: Testing Private Methods

Avdi Grimm — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:56:31 -0000

I believe you are confusing two two job descriptions. Some organizations have professional testers whose job, indeed, is to find bugs. Typically they are not the ones writing unit tests. They are usually writing much higher-level full-system test scripts. When I, as a developer, write unit tests I'm doing it to drive out a good design. The fact that the resulting test suite is good at catching regressions is a handy side-effect.

Re: Testing Private Methods

Ecjones2040 — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:37:20 -0000

Remember that the purpose of testing is to find bugs. There is no question of right or wrong but a question of whether testers are finding mistakes, deviations, and errors more effectively. There are many works covering the topic of software testing. I recommend the works of Cem Kaner.

Re: Testing Private Methods

Craig Jolicoeur — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:22:43 -0000

Nice writeup. I agree with breaking out the code into separate classes here.

Re: Testing Private Methods

Avdi Grimm — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:36:17 -0000

Ruby doesn't really support the notion of free functions (it kind of fakes it, but in a way I prefer not to take advantage of in anything but quick one-off scripts). It could be a class-level method, I suppose. I still prefer the class approach, because then if you decide to mock the slugification out you're not mocking methods on the class under test.

Re: Testing Private Methods

Daniel Schierbeck — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:38:58 -0000

Or the `slugify` method could be turned into a function, since it isn't really relevant to the `BlogPost` instance.

Re: Testing Private Methods

Ben — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 08:13:35 -0000

Couldn't agree more. I often hear questions about testing private methods and to me it makes no sense whatsoever. As you say: private methods are an implementation detail!

Re: Testing Private Methods

bryanl — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:32:37 -0000

I'm glad to have at least provided a little bit inspiration for this blog post. We totally see eye-to-eye on this matter.