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PODo setup/teardown hurt test maintainability?
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copied!<p><em>This seemed to spark a bit of conversation on <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1076263/teaching-testing-habits-to-other-developers/1076288#1076288">another question</a> and I thought it worthy to spin into its own question.</em></p> <p>The DRY principle seems to be our weapon-of-choice for fighting maintenance problems, but what about the maintenance of <strong>test code</strong>? Do the same rules of thumb apply?</p> <p>A few strong voices in the developer testing community are of the opinion that setup and teardown are harmful and should be avoided... to name a few:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://jamesnewkirk.typepad.com/posts/2007/09/why-you-should-.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">James Newkirk</a></li> <li><a href="http://architects.dzone.com/news/testing-duplicate-code-your-te" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Jay Fields</a>, [<a href="http://blog.jayfields.com/2009/06/developer-testing-welcome-to-beta-test.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">2</a>]</li> </ul> <p>In fact, xUnit.net has removed them from the framework altogether for this very reason (though there are <a href="http://xunit.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Comparisons" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ways to get around this self-imposed limitation</a>).</p> <p>What has been your experience? Do setup/teardown hurt or help test maintainability?</p> <p><strong>UPDATE</strong>: do more fine-grained constructs like those available in JUnit4 or TestNG (@BeforeClass, @BeforeGroups, etc.) make a difference?</p>

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