Xebia Blog

Unit tests are brittle: if you change the class under test there’s a more than average chance that you will have to change a load of unit test as well. On the other hand unit tests help you think about design on a micro level. The test shows what a method is supposed to do, without room for the interpretation errors you get when using abstractions as design.

So, should we use unit tests or not?
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Filed under: Java, Testing
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I recently read a book called ‘Design Rules, Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity’ written by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark. It was pointed out to me by Adrian Colyer during the excellent AOP training mentioned in the previous post.
The title ‘Design Rules’, note the plural ‘Rules’, is something of a misnomer. In fact the authors describe only a single rule, albeit a very important one. They argue that the computer industry started its spectacular growth after clever engineers at IBM decided to break up the design of the 360 family into a set of modules that depended on each other through interfaces.
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Filed under: Java
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