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Unit tests as documentation

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174 points thunderbong | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | 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. macspoofing ◴[] No.41877538[source]
>Getting all your teammates to quit giving all their tests names like "testTheThing" is darn near impossible.

You can do better than "testTheThing".

Have your team (or a working group composed of your team, if your team is too big) put together a set of guidelines on naming conventions for unit test methods. Have your team agree to these conventions (assumption is that the working group would have consulted with rest of team and incorporated their feedback).

Then make that part of the code review checklist (so you aren't the one that is actually enforcing the policy). Do spot checks for the first little while, or empower some individuals to be responsible for that - if you really want to. Do a retrospective after a month or 2 months to see how everyone is doing and see how successful this initiative was.