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Unit tests as documentation

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94 points thunderbong | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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tln ◴[] No.41871879[source]
Extracting unit tests from your docs: great!

Somehow extracting your docs from unit tests: might be ok!

Pointing people at unit tests instead of writing docs: not even remotely ok.

Is that really what this guy is advocating??

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bluefirebrand ◴[] No.41872139[source]
> Pointing people at unit tests instead of writing docs: not even remotely ok.

Couldn't agree more

I'm trying to integrate with a team at work that is doing this, and I'm finding it impossible to get a full picture of what their service can do.

I've brought it up with my boss, their boss, nothing happens

And then the person writing the service is angry that everyone is asking him questions about it all the time. "Just go read the tests! You'll see what it does if you read the tests!"

Incredibly frustrating to deal with when my questions are about the business rules for the service, not the functionality of the service

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alphanumeric0 ◴[] No.41873496[source]
The code, tests and comments convey what actual business rules are implemented.

While documentation is someone's non-precise natural language expression of what (to the best of their imperfect human capacity) expected the code to implement at the time of writing.

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1. invaderzirp ◴[] No.41875753[source]
"Oh yeah, those tests are always flaky. We just rerun them until they pass. Or we turn them off. I mean, Jeff wrote them like three years ago and he quit last year, so..."

I'd rather have the prose. And if it's wrong, then fix it. I'm so tired of these excuses.