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Even if code is trivial you should still test it.

A few days ago, Robert C. Martin posted a blog post on The Pragmatics of TDD, where he explains that he doesn't test-drive everything. Some of the exceptions he give, such as not test-driving GUI code and true one-shot code, make sense to me, but there are two exceptions I think are inconsistent.

Robert C. Martin states that he doesn't test-drive

• getters and setters
• one-line functions
• functions that are obviously trivial

There are several problems with this exception that I'd like to point out:

• It confuses cause and effect
• Trivial code may not stay trivial
• It's horrible advice for novices

Causality #

The whole point of Test-Driven Development is that the tests drive the implementation. The test is the cause and the implementation is the effect. If you accept this premise, then how on Earth can you decide not to write a test because the implementation is going to be trivial? You don't know that yet. It's logically impossible.

Robert C. Martin himself proposed the Transformation Priority Premise (TPP), and one of the points here is that as you start out test-driving new code, you should strive to do so in small, formalized steps. The first step is extremely likely to leave you with a 'trivial' implementation, such as returning a constant.

With the TPP, the only difference between trivial and non-trivial implementation code is how far into the TDD process you've come. So if 'trivial' is all you need, the only proper course is to write that single test that demonstrates that the trivial behavior works as expected. Then, according to the TPP, you'd be done.

Encapsulation #

Robert C. Martin's exception about getters and setters is particularly confounding. If you consider a getter/setter (or .NET property) trivial, why even have it? Why not expose a public class field instead?

There are good reasons why you shouldn't expose public class fields, and they are all releated to encapsulation. Data should be exposed via getters and setters because it gives you the option of changing the implementation in the future.

What do we call the process of changing the implementation code without changing the behavior?

This is called refactoring. How do we know that when we change the implementation code, we don't change the behavior?

As Martin Fowler states in Refactoring, you must have a good test suite in place as a safety net, because otherwise you don't know if you broke something.

Successful code lives a long time and evolves. What started out being trivial may not remain trivial, and you can't predict which trivial members will remain trivial years in the future. It's important to make sure that the trivial behavior remains correct when you start to add more complexity. A regression suite addresses this problem, but only if you actually test the trivial features.

Robert C. Martin argues that the getters and setters are indirectly tested by other test cases, but while that may be true when you introduce the member, it may not stay true. Months later, those tests may be gone, leaving the member uncovered by tests.

You can look at it like this: with TDD you may be applying the TPP, but for trivial members, the time span between the first and second transformation may be measured in months instead of minutes.

Learning #

It's fine to be pragmatic, but I think that this 'rule' that you don't have to test-drive 'trivial' code is horrible advice for novices. If you give someone learning TDD a 'way out', they will take it every time things become difficult. If you provide a 'way out', at least make the condition explicit and measurable.

A fluffy condition that "you may be able to predict that the implementation will be trivial" isn't at all measurable. It's exactly this way of thinking that TDD attempts to address: you may think that you already know how the implementation is going to look, but letting tests drive the implementation, it often turns out that you'll be suprised. What you originally thought would work doesn't.

Addressing the root cause #

Am I insisting that you should test-drive all getters and setters? Yes, indeed I am.

But, you may say, it takes too much time? Ironically, Robert C. Martin has much to say on exactly that subject:

The only way to go fast, is to go well

Even so, let's see what it would be like to apply the TPP to a property (Java programmers can keep on reading. A C# property is just syntactic suger for a getter and setter).

Let's say that I have a DateViewModel class and I'd like it to have a Year property of the int type. The first test is this:

[Fact]
public void GetYearReturnsAssignedValue()
{
    var sut = new DateViewModel();
    sut.Year = 2013;
    Assert.Equal(2013, sut.Year);
}

However, applying the Devil's Advocate technique, the correct implementation is this:

public int Year
{
    get { return 2013; }
    set { }
}

That's just by the TPP book, so I have to write another test:

[Fact]
public void GetYearReturnsAssignedValue2()
{
    var sut = new DateViewModel();
    sut.Year = 2010;
    Assert.Equal(2010, sut.Year);
}

Together, these two tests prompt me to correctly implement the property:

public int Year { get; set; }

While those two tests could be refactored into a single Parameterized Test, that's still a lot of work. Not only do you need to write two test cases for a single property, but you'd have to do exactly the same for every other property!

Exactly the same, you say? And what are you?

Ah, you're a programmer. What do programmers do when they have to do exactly the same over and over again?

Well, if you make up inconsistent rules that enable you to skip out of doing things that hurt, then that's the wrong answer. If it hurts, do it more often.

Programmers automate repeated tasks. You can do that when testing properties too. Here's how I've done that, using AutoFixture:

[Theory, AutoWebData]
public void YearIsWritable(WritablePropertyAssertion a)
{
    a.Verify(Reflect<DateViewModel>.GetProperty<int>(sut => sut.Year));
}

This is a declarative way of checking exactly the same behavior as the previous two tests, but in a single line of code.

Root cause analysis is in order here. It seems as if the cost/benefit ratio of test-driving getters and setters is too high. However, I think that when Robert C. Martin stops there, it's because he considers the cost fixed, and the benefit is then too low. However, while the benefit may seem low, the cost doesn't have to be fixed. Lower the cost, and the cost/benefit ratio improves. This is why you should also test-drive getters and setters.

Update 2014.01.07: As a follow-up to this article, Jon Galloway interviewed me about this, and other subject, for a Herding Code podcast.

Update, 2018.11.12: A new article reflects on this one, and gives a more nuanced picture of my current thinking.

Comments

This post proposes a scientific experiment about code readability

Once in a while someone tries to drag me into one of many so-called 'religious' debates over code readability:

• Tabs versus spaces?
• Where should the curly braces go?
• Should class members be prefixed (e.g. with an underscore)?
• Is the this C# keyword redundant?
• etc.

In most cases, the argument revolves around what is most readable.

Let's look at the C# keyword this as an example. Many programmers feel that it's redundant because they can omit it without changing the program. The compiler doesn't care. However, as Martin Fowler wrote in Refactoring: "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." Code is read much more than written, so I don't buy the argument about redundancy.

There are lots of circumstances when code is read. Often, programmers read code from inside their IDE. This has been used as an argument against Hungarian notation. However, at other times, you may be reading code as part of a review process - e.g. on GitHub or CodePlex. Or you may be reading code on a blog post, or in a book.

Often I feel that the this keyword helps me because it provides information about the scope of a variable. However, I also preach that code should consist of small classes with small methods, and if you follow that principle, variable scoping should be easily visible on a single screen.

Another argument against using the this keyword is that it's simply noise and that it makes it harder to read the program, simply because there's more text to read. Such a statement is impossible to refute with logic, because it depends on the person reading the code.

Ultimately, the readability of code depends on circumstances and is highly subjective. For that reason, we can't arrive at a conclusion to any of those 'religious' debates by force of logic. However, what we could do, on the other hand, is to perform a set of scientific experiments to figure out what is most readable.

A science experiment idea for future computer scientists #

Here's an idea for a computer science experiment:

1. Pick a 'religious' programming debate (e.g. whether or not the this keyword enhances or reduces readability).
2. Form a hypothesis (e.g. predict that the this keyword enhances readability).
3. Prepare a set of simple code listings, each with two alternatives (with and without this).
4. Randomly select two groubs of test subjects.
5. Ask each group to explain to you what the code does (what is the result of calling a method, etc.). One group gets one alternative set, and the other group gets the other set.
6. Measure how quickly members of each group arrives at a correct conclusion.
7. Compare results against original hypothesis.

Comments

Is there a conflict between Outside-In TDD and DDD? I don't think so.

A reader of my book recently asked me a question:

"you are a DDD and TDD fan and at the same time you like to design your User Interfaces first. I have been reading about DDD and TDD for some time now and your approach confuses me, TDD is about writing tests first to lead the design, DDD is focusing on the domain yet you start with the UI."

In my opinion there's no conflict between Outside-In TDD and DDD, but I must admit that I was a bit surprised by the question. It never occurred to me that there's an apparent conflict between these two approaches, but now that I was asked the question, I understand why one would think so. In other words, I think it's a good question that warrants a proper answer.

Before discussing the synthesis of Outside-In TDD and DDD I think we need to examine each concept individually.

DDD #

As far as I can tell, Domain-Driven Design is a horribly misunderstood book. By corollary, so is the DDD concept itself. The problem with the book is that it provides value and guidance along two axes:

• Patterns and other coding advice
• Principles for analysis and modeling

Don't let the fact that all these patterns are described in a book called Domain-Driven Design trick you into thinking that they are intrinsically bound to DDD. Using the patterns don't make your code Domain-Driven, and you can do DDD without them. Obviously, you can also combine them.

This provides a partial answer to the original question. Outside-In TDD doesn't conflict with the patterns described in Domain-Driven Design, just as it doesn't conflict with most other design patterns.

That still leaves the 'true' DDD: the principles for analyzing and modeling the subject matter for a piece of software. If that is a design technique, and Outside-In TDD is also a design technique, isn't there a conflict?

Outside-In TDD #

Outside-In TDD, as I describe it in my Pluralsight course, isn't a design technique. TDD isn't a design technique. Granted, TDD provides fast feedback about the design you are implementing, but it's not a blind design technique.

Outside-In TDD and DDD #

Once you realize that a major reason that Outside-In TDD and DDD seems to be at odds, is because of the false premise that TDD is a design technique, you should also realize that there isn't, after all, any conflict. There's no reason that you can't do both, but it doesn't mean you always should.

• You can do Outside-In TDD without DDD. If you are building a CRUD application, DDD is probably going to be overkill. If so, skip it.
• You can do DDD without Outside-In TDD. If you are being paid to build or extract a true Domain Model, it makes sense to do so decoupled from any sort of application boundaries.
• You can combine Outside-In TDD with DDD, but I think this will often make best sense as an iterative approach. First you build the application. Then you realize that the business logic within the application is so complex that you'll need to extract a proper Domain Model in order to keep it maintainable.

In my Pluralsight course, I also discuss the Test Pyramid. While it makes sense to begin development at the boundary (e.g. UI) of an application, you shouldn't stay at the boundary. Most tests should still be unit tests. Once you reach the phase where you realize that you'll need to evolve a proper Domain Model, you should do that with unit tests, not boundary tests. Domain Models should be implemented decoupled from all boundaries (UI, I/O and persistence), so you can only directly test a Domain Model with unit tests.

In the end, it's all a question of perspective. Outside-In TDD states that you should begin your TDD process at the boundary. In the beginning, it will focus on the externally visible behavior of the system, but as development progresses, other parts of the system must be dealt with. This is where DDD can be valuable. The lack of conflict eventually stems from the fact that Outside-In TDD and DDD operate on different levels of application architecture, with little overlap.

In my experience, a lot of applications can be written with Outside-In TDD without a Domain Model ever having to evolve - and still be maintainable. These applications may still employ the 'Supple Design Patterns', but that doesn't mean that they are Domain-Driven.

Comments

ploeh blog is sorta moving

For more than four years ploeh blog has been driven by dasBlog, since I originally had to move away from my original MSDN blog. At the time, dasBlog seemed like a good choice for a variety of reasons, but not too long after, development seemed to stop.

It's my hope that, as a reader, you haven't been too inconvenienced about that choice of blogging engine, but as the owner and author, I've grown increasingly frustrated with dasBlog. Yesterday, ploeh blog moved to a new platform and a new host.

What's new? #

The new platform for ploeh blog is Jekyll-Bootstrap hosted on GitHub pages. If you don't know what Jekyll-Bootstrap is, it's a parsing engine that creates a complete static web site from templates and data. This means that when you read this on the internet, you are reading a static HTML page served directly from a file. There's no application server involved.

Since ploeh blog is now a static web site, I had to make a few shortcuts here and there. One example is that I can't have any forms on the web site, so I can't have a contact me form - but I didn't have that before either, so that's not really a problem. There are still plenty of ways in which you can contact me.

Another example is that the blog can't have a server-driven comment engine. As an alternative, Jekyll provides several options for including a third-party commenting service, such as Disqus, Livefyre, IntenseDebate, etc. I could have done that too, but have chosen to try another alternative.

There are several reasons why I prefer to avoid a third-party solution. First of all, in case you haven't noticed, I'm into this whole blogging thing for the long haul. I've been steadily blogging since January 2006, and have no plans to stop. Somehow, I expect to keep blogging for a longer period than I expect the average third-party content provider to last - or to keep their service free.

Second, I think it's more proper to keep the comments with ploeh blog. These comments were originally submitted by their authors to ploeh blog, which implies that they trusted me to treat them with respect. If I somehow were to move all those comments to a third party, what would become of the copyright?

Third, while it wasn't entirely trivial to merge the comments into each post, it looked like the simplest solution, compared to have to somehow migrate comments for some 200+ posts to a third party using an unknown (to me) API.

What this all means is that I've decided to simply keep the comments as part of the body of the post. Comments, too, is static content. This also means that comments are included in syndication feeds - a side effect that I'm not entirely happy about, but for which I don't yet have a good solution.

So, if comments are all static, does it mean that I no longer accept comments? No, I still accept comments. Just send me a pull request. Snarky, perhaps, but the advantage of that is that if you want, you'll have a lot more flexibility if you want to comment: you could include code, images, tables, lists, etc. The only checkpoint you'll have to get past is me :)

Actually, you are welcome to send me pull requests for other enchancements as well, if you'd like. Did I spell a word incorrectly? Send me a pull request. Is a link broken? Send me a pull request. Do you know way more about web site design than I do and want to help? Send me a pull request :) Seriously, as you may have noticed, ploeh blog is currently using the default Twitter Bootstrap design. That's not particularly interesting to look at, but I hope that the most important part of the blog is the content, so I didn't use much energy on changing the look - it probably wouldn't have been to the better anyway.

Since the content is the most important part of the blog, I've also gone to some lentgth to ensure that old permalinks to posts still work. If you encounter a link that no longer works, please let me know (or send me a pull request).

Finally, as all RSS subscribers have probably noticed by now, switching the blog has caused some RSS hiccups. While the old feed address still works, the permalink URL scheme has changed, because I didn't think it made sense to have static files and URLs ending with .aspx.

What was wrong with dasBlog? #

Originally, I chose dasBlog as a blogging engine because it had some attractive features. However, the main problem with it is that it's no longer being maintained. There seems to be no roadmap for it.

Second, the commenting feature didn't work well. Many readers had trouble submitting comments, particularly if they wanted to include links or other HTML formatting. I also got a lot of comment spam.

Finally, the authoring experience slowly degraded. The built-in editor only worked in Firefox, and while I don't mind having Firefox installed, it was a cause of concern that I could only edit with one out of three installed browsers. What if it also stopped working in Firefox?

It was definitely time to move on, but whereto?

Why Jekyll? #

Before I decided to go with Jekyll, I looked at various options for blogging sofware or services, including WordPress.com, Blogger, FunnelWeb, Orchard, and others. However, none of them could meet my requirements:

• Simplicity. Everything that required a relational database to host a blog was immediately dismissed. This is 2013. A RDBMS for a single user blog site? Seriously?
• Easy hosting. Requiring a RDBMS significantly constrains my deployment options. It also tends to make hosting much more expensive. Since January 2009 I've been hosting ploeh blog on my own server in my home, but I've become increasingly annoyed at having to operate my own server. This is, after all, 2013.
• Backwards compatible. The new blog should be able to handle the old blog's permalinks. Redirects were OK, but I couldn't just leave hundreds of external links to ploeh blog with a 404. That pretty much ruled out all hosted services.
• Forward compatible. This is the second time I change blog platform, and it's not going to be the last. I need a solution that enables me to move forward, taking all the existing content with me to a new service or platform.

I seriously toyed with writing my own blogging engine to meet all those requirements, but soon realized that Jekyll was a pretty good match. It's not perfect, but good enough for now.

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Announcing the general release of AutoFixture 3.

AutoFixture 3 has been under way in a long time, but after about of a month of limited beta/CTP/whatever trial, I've decided to release it as the 'official' current version of AutoFixture. Since AutoFixture uses Semantic Versioning, the shift from 2.16.2 to 3.0.0 (actually, 3.0.1) signifies breaking changes. While we've made an effort to make the impact of these breaking changes as light as possible, it's worth noting that it's probably not a good idea upgrading to AutoFixture 3 five minutes before you are heading out of the door for the weekend.

Read more about what's new and what has changed in the release notes.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen. There have been a lot of people contributing, providing feedback, asking intelligent questions, etc. but I particularly want to thank Nikos Baxevanis for all the work he's been putting into AutoFixture. Conversely, as is usual in such circumstances, all mistakes are my responsibility.

What's new? #

When you read the release notes, you may find the amount of new features is quite unimpressive. This is because we've been continually releasing new features under the major version number of 2, in a sort of Continuous Delivery process. Because of the way Semantic Versioning works, breaking changes must be signaled by increasing the major version number, so while we could release new features as they became available, I thought it better to bundle up breaking changes into a bigger release; if not, we'd be looking at AutoFixture 7 or 8 now... And as I'm writing this, I notice that my installation of Chrome is on major version 25, so maybe it's just something I need to get over.

Personal release notes #

One thing that the release notes don't explicitly mention, but I'd like to talk about a little is that AutoFixture 3 is running on an extensively rebuilt kernel. One of the visions I had for AutoFixture 3 was that the kernel structure should be immutable, and it should be as easy to take away functionality than it is to add custom functionality. Taking away functionality was really hard (or perhaps impossible) in AutoFixture 2, and that put a constraint on what you could do with AutoFixture. It also put a constraint on how opinionated its defaults could be.

The AutoFixture 3 kernel makes it possible to take away functionality, as well as add new functionality. At the moment, you have to understand the underlying kernel to figure out how to do that, but in the future I plan to surface an API for that as well.

In any case, I find it interesting that using real SOLID principles, I was able to develop the new kernel in parallel with the version 2 kernel. Partly because I was very conscious of not introducing breaking changes, but also because I follow the Open/Closed Principle, I rarely had to touch existing code, but could build the new parts of the kernel in parallel. Even more interestingly, I think, is the fact that once that work was done, replacing the kernel turned out to be a point release. This happened late November 2012 - more than three months ago. If you've been using AutoFixture 2.14.1 or a more recent version, you've already been using the AutoFixture 3 kernel for some time.

The reason I find this interesting is that sometimes casual readers of my blog express skepticism over whether the principles I talk about can be applied in 'realistic' settings. According to Ohloh, AutoFixture has a total of 197,935 lines of code, and I consider that a fair sized code base. I practice what I preach. QED.

This is the eighth post in a series of posts about the String Calculator kata done with AutoFixture.

This screencast implements the requirement of the kata's exercise 8 and 9. Although the kata has nine steps, it turned out that I slightly misinterpreted the requirements of exercise 8 and ended up implementing the requirements of exercise 9 as well as those of exercise 8 - or perhaps I was just gold plating.

If you liked this screencast, you may also like my Pluralsight course Outside-In Test-Driven Development.

This is the seventh post in a series of posts about the String Calculator kata done with AutoFixture.

This screencast implements the requirement of the kata's exercise 7.

Next exercise

If you liked this screencast, you may also like my Pluralsight course Outside-In Test-Driven Development.

This is the sixth post in a series of posts about the String Calculator kata done with AutoFixture.

This screencast implements the requirement of the kata's exercise 6.

Next exercise

If you liked this screencast, you may also like my Pluralsight course Outside-In Test-Driven Development.

This is the fifth post in a series of posts about the String Calculator kata done with AutoFixture.

This screencast implements the requirement of the kata's exercise 5.

Next exercise

If you liked this screencast, you may also like my Pluralsight course Outside-In Test-Driven Development.

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This is the fourth post in a series of posts about the String Calculator kata done with AutoFixture.

This screencast implements the requirement of the kata's exercise 4.

Next exercise

If you liked this screencast, you may also like my Pluralsight course Outside-In Test-Driven Development.

Comments