Re: unit testing practices...

On Wed, 5 Nov 2003 02:48 pm, peter royal wrote:
> started playing with clover, trying to get test coverage up before
> hacking things up to support funky things with components.. using
> clover a guide to know when "done" ...

sweet!

> is it standard practice to also test exception blocks? for instance,
> Assembler is fully covered, except for the catch blocks. should I feed
> it known bad data just to exercise these?

I generally do. However the unit tests that are in phoenix atm are really 
really badly done ;) ie each unit test tends to test lots more than what it 
saids and it can be easy to miss tes coverage if you use such broad brush 
strokes. 

What I tend to do now is have really small unit tests that just test a single 
method and all its purmutations (including error conditions). I encode the 
data in the test case and dont bother with external files at all. ie XML 
input is encoded in strings and only really used to test parsing.

I just commited a small test case for assembler to show you the type of tests 
I tend to write. If you want to see more examples check out either the qdox 
or metaclass codebases for similar examples.

Anyways - thats what I consider good coding practices

-- 
Cheers,

Peter Donald
USER, n.:
        The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."
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