Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

Yep it's very easy to tear down a straw man of your own creation. Meanwhile I'll keep writing useful tests that validate my code and prevent regressions.

View on HN

This comment breaks the site guidelines. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your HN posts more substantive (and less mean) in the future? Note these guidelines:

"Don't be snarky."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

How do you know that your tests are useful ? most (I'm a senior tester so I know a few) teams write tests that are useful when they are new or when a new feature is being developed, those tests quickly stop finding problems and in the worst case give false negatives (fail for no reason).

A related problem are Rotten green tests [1]

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00062

If a test never fails unexpectedly then you know that particular test has been a waste of time.

e.g. if no regressions ever get picked up by the test subsequently

That's an interesting statement. Imagine I have a test which never fails unexpectedly. But it expectedly fails when I decide to refactor some code. By your definition that test was a waste of time, by my definition it did excatly what it was supossed to do.

If you're expecting it to fail then your brain is already doing the work that the test is meant to do. It serves as an expensive to-do reminder in that scenario.

If you are part way or all the way through your refactor and think you're on the right track and then you unexpectedly have a failing test, then I would say that that was a useful bit of test code.

The point they're trying to make, I believe, is that you should write tests that'd pass mutation testing (testing the tests, so to speak).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_testing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com