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My post is a reaction to my previous job, where management cared more for tests than the actual product, and I was tasked with proving a negative. I was asking for a definition of "unit testing" and I always get different responses, so I've taken to asking using my own projects. It may seem cynical, but I assumed that anyone into "testing" (TDD, unit testing, what have you) wouldn't bother with testing that function, or with limited testing of that function (as I wrote). You aren't the first to answer with "no way am I testing that function to that level," but no where have I gotten an answer to "well then, what level?" This may seem like a tangent to TDD, but in every case, I try to see how I could apply, in this case, TDD, to code I write, and it never seems like it's a good match. What I'm doing isn't a unit test (so what's a unit? Isn't a single function in a single file enough of a unit?). I'm not doing TDD because I have to write code first (but then, the testing code fails to compile, so there's not artifact to test). People are dogmatic about this stuff, but there's no discussion about the unspoken assumptions surrounding this stuff. Basically, the whole agile, extreme, test driving design seems to have fallen out of the enterprise area, where new development is rare and updating code bases that are 10, 20, 40 years old are the norm and management are treating engineers like assembly line workers, each one easily replaceable because of ISO 9000 documentation. And "agile consultants" are making bank telling management what they want to hear, engineers be damned because they don't pay the bills (they're a cost center anyway). |
Anyways, you never asked me "well then, what level"? and I thought I did answer it but here's an answer anyways (to your unasked question): I'd test it to the point that made sense. I wouldn't follow some poorly considered hard and fast rule (morons do that, we're not morons, we are humans with brains and a capacity to exercise judgement in complex situations). A hard and fast 70% code coverage rule is stupid, as is 100%, even a strict 1% rule is stupid (though for other reasons, like that it's trivially achieved with useless tests for almost every program). If I'm writing code and 90% of it is handling error codes from syscalls, then you'll likely end up getting 10% code coverage from tests (of various sorts, not just unit) out of me. I'm not going to mock all those syscalls to force my code to execute those paths, and I'm not going to work out some random incantation that somehow causes fork to fail for this one program or process but also doesn't hose my entire test rig. Especially not when the error handling is "exit with this error code or that error code". If it were more complex (cleanly disconnects from the database, closes out some files) then I'd find a way to exercise it, but not by mocking the whole OS. That's just a waste of time.
To reiterate my take: We have brains, we have the opportunity to use them. Use the appropriate techniques to the situation, and don't waste time doing things like mocking every Linux syscall just because your manager is a moron. Educate them, explain why it would be a waste of time and money and demonstrate other ways to get the desired results they want (in a situation like your example, inspecting the code since it's so short should be fine).