StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>Depends on the size of the app, but for any nontrivial real life app it is a <em>huge</em> effort to satisfiably cover it with unit tests. So you need to prioritize your efforts, to focus on the most critical / most frequently changed / most buggy parts of the system (usually these overlap quite a bit: the most critical parts are usually the ones most often touched to add new functionality or to fix bugs).</p> <p>A good method is to write unit tests more or less in TDD fashion whenever you need to touch any part of the code. I wrote "more or less" because for legacy code, you typically need to write much higher level, more complex unit tests than for greenfield development. In fact, in some cases it may not even be productive to start with unit tests, instead it is better to create functional/system tests to cover large grained functionality from the user perspective.</p> <p>Note that, depending on the available documentation and level of developer/user knowledge about the system, you may not always be able to determine the "correct" behaviour for a specific functionality, only its <em>current</em> behaviour. Even in this case, it is worth covering it with (unit) tests: these document the code's actual behaviour and detect any unexpected changes in it in the future.</p> <p>Once you have the actual piece of code reasonably covered with unit tests, this gives you the confidence needed for refactoring. Do some (simple or more complex) refactoring whenever you touch the code. However, don't overdo it. If you need to change a single line for a bugfix, it may be overkill to start refactoring a whole inheritance hierarchy (even if it is really messy). Make notes about such impending refactoring tasks and try to schedule them later.</p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload