connect four (game)

[Christopher Reimer]

On Nov 25, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 10:02 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sun, Nov 26, 2017 at 3:36 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 6:00 AM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>>>> Where are your unittests for these unittests?
>>> 
>>> No, the point of having unit tests is to build confidence that the
>>> code in question works correctly. It's *possible* that the code is
>>> broken, and that the test is also broken in a way that hides the
>>> brokenness of the code, but this is much less likely than the case
>>> where just the code is broken. This is also the reason why the
>>> philosophy of test-drive development stipulates that one should write
>>> the test *first*, run it and watch it fail (this ensures that the test
>>> is actually testing *something*) and then and only then write the code
>>> to make the test pass.
>> 
>> To be fair, TDD doesn't actually prove that the test isn't broken. It
>> only protects you against one class of error: tests that actually
>> aren't testing anything. Proponents of TDD will argue that this class
>> of error is quite common; true or not, it's still only one particular
>> kind of failure. It's definitely possible for tests to be wrong in
>> such a way that they don't detect faulty code.
>> 
>> So what do we do? WE TEST BY HAND. Ultimately, unit testing is a tool,
>> not a magic wand. It's up to us to actually put it to use to improve
>> code quality.
> 
> Certainly. I wasn't trying to advocate for TDD here, which I don't
> even practice regularly myself.
> -- 
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

For anyone who is interested, "Test-Driven Development with Python: Obey the Testing Goat: Using Django, Selenium, and JavaScript" by Harry J.W. Percival. The second edition came out this year. A good introduction to unit and function testing.

Chris R.