Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

7
  • Ah I totally forgot that quote! Guess I will use it as my main argument because frankly - what can break here? Not really much. Only thing that can break is the method invocation and if that happens than it means something really bad happened. Thanks! Commented Jan 19, 2012 at 21:35
  • 7
    @Zenzen: "what can break here? Not really much." - So it can break. Just a small typo. Or somebody adds some code. Or messes up the dependency. I really think that Beck would claim that your main example qualifies as breakable. Getters and setters, less so, although I have caught myself out in a copy/paste error, even then. The real question is, if it's too trivial to write a test, why does it even exist? Commented Jan 19, 2012 at 21:44
  • 1
    The amount of time you spent thinking about it already you could have written the test. i say write the test, don't leave when not to write a test as a grey area, more broken windows will appear. Commented Jan 20, 2012 at 0:11
  • 1
    I'll add that my general experience is that testing getters and setters is somewhat valuable in the long-term, but low-priority. The reason why is because why it has "zero" chance of finding a bug now, you can't guarantee that another developer won't add something in three months ("just a simple if statement") that will have a chance of breaking. Having a unit test in place guards against that. At the same time, it isn't really overly high priority, because you aren't going to find anything soon that way. Commented Jan 20, 2012 at 4:00
  • 8
    Blindly testing everything that could break doesn't make sense. There needs to be a strategy where high risk components get tested first. Commented Mar 27, 2014 at 23:50