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Unit tests as documentation

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174 points thunderbong | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.288s | source
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bunderbunder ◴[] No.41874483[source]
I share this ideal, but also have to gripe that "descriptive test name" is where this falls apart, every single time.

Getting all your teammates to quit giving all their tests names like "testTheThing" is darn near impossible. It's socially painful to be the one constantly nagging people about names, but it really does take constant nagging to keep the quality high. As soon as the nagging stops, someone invariably starts cutting corners on the test names, and after that everyone who isn't a pedantic weenie about these things will start to follow suit.

Which is honestly the sensible, well-adjusted decision. I'm the pedantic weenie on my team, and even I have to agree that I'd rather my team have a frustrating test suite than frustrating social dynamics.

Personally - and this absolutely echoes the article's last point - I've been increasingly moving toward Donald Knuth's literate style of programming. It helps me organize my thoughts even better than TDD does, and it's earned me far more compliments about the readability of my code than a squeaky-clean test suite ever does. So much so that I'm beginning to hold hope that if you can build enough team mass around working that way it might even develop into a stable equilibrium point as people start to see how it really does make the job more enjoyable.

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1. misja111 ◴[] No.41876977[source]
Thanks for the hint about Knuth's literate programming! I hadn't heard about it before but it immediately looks great. (For those of us who hadn't heard about it before either, here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming)

About your other point: I have experienced exactly the same. It just seems impossible to instill the belief into most developers that readable tests lead to faster solving of bugs. And by the way, it makes tests more maintainable as well, just like readable code makes the code more maintainable anywhere else.