Unit testing - suitable for all development?

[Lidor Wyssocky]

kylotan at hotmail.com (Kylotan) wrote in message news:<153fa67.0403070839.77ae66e6 at posting.google.com>...
> Today I tried to implement some sort of unit testing into my program
> for the first time, and must admit to being a little disillusioned
> with the process. Mainly, my issue is that in my program, the classes
> are so tightly coupled that testing in isolation is next to
> impossible.
> 
> The main problem stems from the fact that I try to ensure that all my
> objects are created in a working state. This often means passing
> various other objects to the __init__ function. In turn, these other
> objects rely on others, and on general initialisation procedures. The
> end result is that there are very few objects I can truly test in
> isolation; I have to initialise at least 80% of the system before I
> can even create most of my objects. This ends up meaning that unit
> testing isn't really testing a single unit at all, and in fact isn't
> much more precise than liberally using asserts in the normal code.
> 
> One way out of this would be to reduce coupling. This would allow me
> to test objects in relative isolation, but it would increase the
> amount of explicit coupling code that I'd have to execute normally.
> This extra code then becomes a potential source of new bugs.
> 
> Has anybody else come to similar conclusions?

You may be able to use some of the guidelines available at: 
http://www.qualityprogramming.org/Testing/DesigningDeveloperTests/DesigningDeveloperTests.htm

Lidor

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Lidor Wyssocky
http://www.QualityProgramming.org
http://www.SharpDevelopment.com