On Thursday 03 January 2002 07:54 am, Andriy Palamarchuk wrote:
Alexandre Julliard wrote:
The value of unit tests is exactly in failures! The more failures of unit tests we have - the better test developers do their work.
The whole programming methodology exists which dictates that you write tests first, then implement code which makes them succeed. Please, look at this short article to better understand my point of view: "Test Infected: Programmers Love Writing Tests" http://members.pingnet.ch/gamma/junit.htm
According to Extreme Programming Installed, the chapter on Unit Tests, page 97: "Everyone on the team releases code only when all the unit tests in the entire system run at 100 percent". So in theory there shouldn't be any failures since the code wouldn't make it into the CVS tree. The only way this could work in the face of missing functionality is that the tests for that functionality are not run until the functionality is implemented.
The value is when you add new functionality (and possibly new tests) and old tests break. Then you can pinpoint the changes that caused the old tests to break. Again, that can only work if all the old tests succeeded, which means you can't include tests that you know will fail in a release.
--Rob