Question

Advice on unit testing

Asked by: kateL

Hi Expert.

Anyone do unit testing or TDD out there?

I am using the MVP design patters and am writing a permissions module where I can add groups and subgroups, add subgroups to groups, add users to subgroups, grant users permissions etc &

I want to test my presenter. So I want to test that when certain methods in my presenter are called then rows are added, deleted, updated etc in my database correctly. But I dont want to actually use my database so I want to write stubs to act as my database might.

I am wondering whats the best way of doing this?

There are around 3 tables in my database that the modules will be using.

Should I create an in memory store of these 3 table, then run my tests which will pass in some hard coded values and then check that the new state of my tables are what Id expect them to be?

Anyone have any sample code that they might have that does this or any advice on that best way to accomplish it.

Thanks a lot

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Asked On
2007-11-04 at 17:59:34ID22938215
Topics

.NET

,

Programming for ASP.NET

,

C# Programming Language

Participating Experts
1
Points
125
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: evilrixPosted on 2007-11-05 at 00:55:54ID: 20214559

 

by: evilrixPosted on 2007-11-05 at 00:58:34ID: 20214568

>> Should I create an in memory store of these 3 table,

In the ideal world unittests should be self contained, they should generate all their test data and not rely on external sources that might; otherwise, infuence the results. So, my view is yes, where possible create fixed in memory representations of your data and test with contstant values that should have deterministic output. If this output changes from what is expected the unit test should be considered failed.

 

by: evilrixPosted on 2007-11-05 at 01:01:32ID: 20214580

...also, I prefer to treat set up issues as errors and not unit test failures so as to semantically distinguish the difference. For example, if you can't read from a test data file and this isn't actually what you are testing this is a unit test error, if; however, reading from the file is what you are actually testing then it is a unit test failure. This way, when you look at UT reports you'll know what is a problem with your unit test and what is a problem with the code it is testing. Does that make sense? :)

 

by: kateLPosted on 2007-11-05 at 03:11:37ID: 20214945

Thanks evilrix, that does make sense and I will read those articles as well as soon as I get a chance.

I'm writing the tests now but need to know one small thing

When I have this line of code:
Expect.Call(_view.GetCustomerID).Return(???);

This is going to take a value from my view and eventually pass it into my model.

But the return value is got from a cookie and i don't know what it will be, only that it'll be a string.

How can i set up the expectation that GetCustomerID will be called when I don't know what value it will return? Rhino Mocks will not let me not specify the return value.

Thanks a million for your help, this is the last piece of the jigsaw for me

 

by: evilrixPosted on 2007-11-05 at 03:26:17ID: 20214988

You can only unit test things that are deterministic. Everything else, unfortunately, has to be considered a QA test. I know that's not really a helpful answer but all I can say is if there is no way that this result can be made deterministic then what you need to do is ensure it is called out as a test case for your QA team (or dev team if you do your own QA testing).

See if you can make it deterministic but do not modify the code on test to facilitate unit testing, it is bad practice to change release code just to make unit testing easier. Good testing is a combination of solid unit tests and solid QA with all test cases identified and called out. If you've got all your use cases documented well your QA should be able to generate all their test cases from these.

I hope this in some way helps.

-Rx.

 

by: kateLPosted on 2007-11-05 at 03:46:11ID: 20215053

That does make things clearer.

Thanks a lot

 

by: evilrixPosted on 2007-11-05 at 03:47:05ID: 20215054

You are very welcome.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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