1  Extreme Programming Extremism

Dark chocolate is good for you.  It’s good for your heart and may prevent cancer.  But no one should take consumption of dark chocolate to the extreme and eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That wouldn’t just be silly, it would be decidedly unhealthy.  Yet a current fad in software development goes under the moniker of “extreme programming” where otherwise good ideas are taken to extremes.  Code reviews are good, so have someone sitting next you continuously code reviewing every keystroke you type.  Or, the subject of this essay, testing code in isolation is good and using mocks is useful, so obsessively test every class in isolation while mocking every other class it depends on.  It is the goal of this essay to argue for a more pragmatic, moderate approach to unit testing. Continue reading “Pragmatic Unit Testing, Part 1”