weblog.masukomi.org

Dear Perforce: fuck you. August 31, 2007

[Update: Please note that I’m not just bitching about Perforce. No, I don’t like it, but I’ve done something about it. I’ve written a tool called SSCM to enable people experiencing my frustrations to work with tools we do appreciate and still keep our work synced with tools like Perforce for the benefit of our coworkers. ]

[Update 2: I’ve responded to the many comments about this here, and on Reddit Programming in a new post.]

Dear Perforce:

Fuck you.

Fuck you, you miserable, untrustworthy, misleading, overpriced bastard. I hope your office goes up in flames along with all your off-site backups. I pray that some open source product that actually works is embraced by all the major companies and drives you out of business. I hope that no other company is duped by your salespeople into thinking you have something even remotely close in quality to the ancient and craptastic product known as CVS. Never before have I experienced so much pain in the most simplistic of version control tasks as I have since starting to work at a company that made the mistake of considering you.

I am in total agreement with Linus that CVS is evil and that anyone who chooses to use it knowing the alternatives is both “stupid and ugly”, but I would switch from Perforce to CVS in a heartbeat. I would bow down an kiss CVS’s authors feet if I could avoid ever using your self flagellation “tool” again.

I am currently the only one working in my codebase:

• Four times now I have come into work, started coding, and opened up a file that i edited, and submitted the day before only to find it’s at some prior version. Telling perforce to sync it just results in it telling me it *is* in sync. The end result is that i have to do a sync -f (which tells it to forcibly overwrite everything every morning or else risk screwing over my repo by editing and checking in a file that was rolled back without it telling me). No, unit tests don’t catch this problem because it will roll them back like anything else, and since i never intentionally check in failing code the test from before the mysterious rollback gives me a green bar just like the one after the rollback and it’s not like i memorize the number of tests I have in each project at the end of every day. Today it forced me to merge in “their” changes. Except I’m the only one working in the damn branch, and I’ve only got one “client” that refers to it.
• When you try and “integrate” (otherwise known as “merge”) files from folder A (where you’ve been working) into folder B it will tell you that “their” stuff has changes but “your” stuff is fine and would you like to accept “their” changes? You see “their” changes are the ones that YOU made in folder A and “your” changes are the ones (if any) from folder B that you weren’t screwing with and are trying to merge into.
• It changes the file permissions. It changes line endings. Yes there are preferences for both of these but there shouldn’t be. A version control system should never alter the files you put into it in any way. The command line tools are pure crap. If you want to do anything that isn’t trivial you essentially just have to use the GUI.
• It’s not smart enough to understand that a file that you’ve changed… wait for it…. is a file that you’ve changed!!! oh sure you can say “please mr. perforce, i’d like to edit that file there please” and then it will know, but you can’t just edit a file. That’s crazy talk in perforce land. If you try successive rollbacks of changesets it will start bitching about not wanting to clobber files that it just made writable when you did the last rollback even though you haven’t done anything but tell it to roll back a few times.
• It can’t scale. You want to put terabytes worth of data in it, it’ll let you, but if you dare try and request it you’ll either take down the box or prevent anyone else from being able to do anything on it.
• It alters file permissions in some 17th century attempt at “locking”. This is probably due to the fact that it can’t just tell that you’ve worked on a file. By making the files read only it forces you to tell it that you want to edit it, and thus enables it to know you’ve edited it. It will get confused and bitch about needing to submit files so you’ll tell it to submit but then there aren’t actually any files that need submitting so it creates a changeset with no files in it and then refuses to submit the changeset with no files in it. This changeset will then sit around mocking you until the sun explodes or you go and delete it…. delete the file that it told you you had to create and then refused to accept.
• It makes me waste hours every week fighting with it.

Pitchforks and vile thoughts,

-Kate

Popularity: 17% [?]

Code Underwriters

Code Underwriters



Lloyds
of London is able to do what they do thanks to the concept of
underwriters.
The simplistic version is that a risk is spread amongst a group of underwriters.
If nothing goes wrong they get a cut of the profits relative the the percentage
of the risk they took on. If things go wrong they take pay for whatever portion
of the risk they agreed to take on.



It occurred to me that being a software developer is in many ways like being an
underwriter, except, in most cases, without the big payoff. You see, each
developer on a project tends to take responsibility for a portion of the
code-base. We talk about spreading this responsibility around by increasing
the
bust count but the fact of the matter is that this rarely ever happens. Most
code-bases tend to be divided into sections each with a bus count of one or two.
When something goes wrong the developer(s) responsible for the responsible piece
of code are generally expected to do whatever it takes to make it work
now. In some cases this means being woken
at 3AM, hauling your butt into work, and remaining there until the bug is
squashed. Just like an underwriter at Lloyds, the more risk you take
responsibility for the more screwed you’ll be when things eventually go wrong.
Unlike a Lloyds underwriter we don’t get a cut of the profits relative to the
amount of responsibility we take on.



It is, obviously, quite debatable just what portion of the profits would
constitute a “fair” portion of the profits, but in general we just get paid our
salary. The first employees of a company frequently do get the payout, but most
developers aren’t them. I’ve also heard tale of magical things called “bonuses”
but it seems rare that developers actually get them or that they’re enough to
buy you more than one box under the Christmas tree if you do see them. So, for
the most part, we can treat these things as non-existent, which brings us back
to our salary. Which is, in many ways, like insurance. While you don’t get a
huge portion of the profits, you do get a guarantee of sorts from your employer
that you’ll continue to get paid well even if things don’t work out. Which makes
your employer a fellow underwriter in the development of your software.



There are three things that need to be underwritten in any given software
project: The effort that will be required to fix things when they break, the
money that will be required to finance the fixing of broken things, the money
that will be required to finance the creation of
potentially broken things. There’s also
the money required to finance the project(s) needed to compensate for the
projects that didn’t bring in more money than they cost to create and/or
maintain but that’s a bit too recursive for this example.



From a financial standpoint, I think it’s understandable why developers don’t
get a larger cut of the profits. While the worst case scenario for us is rather
unpleasant, it’s also very short lived. But, we still get paid quite well during
all those months and years when the project wasn’t bringing in anything notable,
and even when it tanks.



Unfortunately developers are human, and humans are emotional creatures. We tend
to not pay attention to the thing that are present in our every day lives, like
regular paychecks, and focus on the atypical large events. Like having a fear of
flying. If you’re afraid of flying then your brain is not paying fair attention
to the boring everyday fact that millions of people are whizzing about the skies
without any problems. It’s just that when a plane goes down it does so in such
an atypically spectacular way, and that’s what we focus on.



So I’d like to propose a couple things for my fellow code underwriters to help
mitigate our risk, and thus minimize the atypical large events and bring our
perceptions more in line with the small portion of the risk that we’re actually
taking on.

• Write your tests: unit, integration,
  and system. It’s like getting underwriters for the risk you’ve underwritten
  yourself. They’ll put in the hours of work patrolling your code and making
  sure it isn’t broken so that you don’t have to put in the hours fixing the
  code later.
• Increase your bus count. The bigger
  the bus count the more people you can throw at the problem so as to fix it
  faster and / or the greater the likelihood that the problem can be assigned
  to someone other than you.
• Practice
  Defensive
  Development. You don’t wear a bicycle helmet because you’re afraid of
  falling over. You wear a bicycle helmet because you’re afraid someone else
  will make you fall over.
  

Popularity: 3% [?]

Defensive Programming 101 August 30, 2007

Defensive Programming 101

For any given programmer the following statement should
always be treated as truth:

My code sucks, but
your
code sucks more.

Good version control habits and test coverage will get you out of most jams
related to your own code but we rarely write apps that are comprised of just
our code. There are almost always libraries from other people code that you’ll
include to save yourself from having to re-invent the wheel. Obviously you
don’t want to start writing unit tests for code from other projects (you’d
never finish) but there are some basic steps you can take to minimize your
chances of failure.

Untrustable code

The fact is that no matter how good your code is you just can’t trust anything
you didn’t write. Furthermore, you can’t trust what people will
do with their code.

You can’t trust other people’s code because it rarely has good test coverage
or documentation so you can’t be sure if it is broken, or if it works the way
you think it does. And unless it’s a huge open source project you can
generally assume that not many people have looked at it either.

You can’t trust what they will do with their code because it’s
their code not
your code. Whoever “they” are they’ve
got their own ideas about where it’s going next and how to get it there, and
they may not jive with how you want to use it.

Your project must never rely on the successful build of another project,
because it may depend on the successful build of yet another project, or even
worse, end up in a sea of circular dependencies.

The results of another project’s “current” build should similarly not be
trusted. It’s probably not tested well, the implementation could change
completely tomorrow, and it may just be buggy. Whenever possible only use
release builds. If you can’t use a release build at least try and use one that
other people have had success with for a little while.

Untrustable people and environments

Even if you take all the steps possible to defend against other people’s bad
code there’s still the fact that humans are incredibly fallible.

You can not assume that the correct libraries will be where they’re “supposed
to be” or that the version that is there is 100% compatible with the version
you coded against. Even if it is you can’t assume that someone won’t go and
“upgrade” it to a version that isn’t compatible. Always bring your own
libraries and keep them local to your app. Disk space is cheap and unless
you’re on an embedded device it’s better to bring along copies of the
libraries you coded against. It doesn’t matter if the ones you bring along are
completely outdated relative to the latest version; what’s important is that
you can guarantee that the version you coded against works.

Your project must never rely on another
project or its libraries. Period. You can not assume that the other project will
be on every box your project is installed on or that the version on those boxes
be in a state that is either working or compatible with yours. Take whatever you
need from their project and copy it into yours. If you need libraries that it
generates or contains, copy them. If you
must use source code copy it but be very
careful. You don’t want to end up forking it and having to maintain your own
version. Instead, copy it in but do whatever it takes to make it blazingly
obvious that the code should not be
edited unless absolutely necessary. When you do copy over make sure to copy the
smallest amount possible. If you can, build it into a separate library file that
you can update when the need arises.

You also can’t assume that someone isn’t going to screw up a config file, and
that includes you. Just like libraries, bring your own. Maybe you’re working
on a webapp which has some global configuration file that’s shared by other
webapps on the same box. Don’t trust it. Yes use it so that you’ll be in sync
with the other apps but since you can’t guarantee that some sysadmin won’t
accidentally delete or change some piece of it that’s crucial to your app
bring along a fallback with some bare bones settings that should work under
any circumstance you can prepare for. This is exactly why your operating
system has a “safe mode”. The operating system developers know you can’t trust
the users not to accidentally screw something up or install an app that screws
something up. Have a fallback.

If your app is configured differently for different deployments (maybe you’ve
got a dev box, a QA box, and a production box, each with their own different
database settings) then have a separate config file for each deployment. Don’t
have a single config file with different sections that get commented or
uncommented based on which deployment it is. You simply can’t guarantee that
you, or your coworkers, won’t forget to comment or uncomment the right bits
when deploying.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Working for Akamai August 25, 2007

It’s a little odd for me. For reasons beyond the grasp of my conscious mind I
can see myself staying at Akamai for a long time, and in my experience this is a
very atypical thing for a programmer. We tend to be corporate nomads, moving
from company to company every couple years, looking for new projects to
captivate our minds. Until Akamai the only programmers I’d encountered who
stayed in one place for very long were like people going through the motions of
work and life. They continued where they were because it paid the bills and they
couldn’t think of something better to do. But, while Akamai has plenty of new
faces like mine, I keep encountering people who’ve been here for four years,
seven years, since the beginning, and they’re happy. They’re not
just working here, they honestly seem
happy to be working here. And in many
ways it really seems like a “corporate family” , something I previously thought
was a pipe dream of “upper management” types.



What’s even more intriguing about this is that day to day life in Akamai isn’t
tangibly different from most other software companies of our size. We no Google
with game rooms, washing machines, or any other home away from home type things.
We’re bursting at the seams with cubes and the fanciest “perk” is bagels on
Wednesday mornings. I sit by the little kitchenish area of our floor and the
“water-cooler” conversations are the background sounds of my day. They’re smiles
and greetings, impromptu problem solving, and hearing what others are working
on, talk about new cars, and evening classes, but rarely ever frustrations.



What is is that Akamai is doing that maintains these smiles?



For me, a little bit of it is luck. We’ve a good team, with really diverse (and
good) personalities, a fun challenge, and a good manager, and that’s a great
place to be.

Popularity: 3% [?]

99 Lines of code on the wall… August 19, 2007

99 lines of code on the wall.

99 lines of code.

You look around, refactor it down…

98 lines of code on the wall.

98 lines of code on the wall.

98 lines of code.

You look around, refactor it down…

97 lines of code on the wall.

Or, alternately

function singVerse(numLines){

��� if (numLines > 0){

��� �� document.write(”" + numLines + ” lines of code
on the wall.\n”);

��� �� document.write(”" + numLines + ” lines of
code.\n”);

��� �� document.write(”You look around, refactor it
down…\n”);

��� �� numLines -= 1;

��� �� document.write(”" + numLines + ” lines of code
on the wall.\n”);

��� �� singVerse(numLines);

��� } else if (numLines == 0) {

��� ��� document.write(”Totally bug free code on
the wall\n”);

��� } else {

��� ��� document.write(”Need more tests for the
code on the wall.\n”);

��� }

}

singVerse(99);

�

Popularity: 4% [?]

The best argument for compiled languages

I keep thinking back to a short comment at Bar Camp Manchester in the Unit Testing talk. When asked if anyone had written an app with 100% code coverage the guy beside me raised his hand. Now I’ve been advocating for a while now that it’s essentially wasted time to bother testing your getters and setters, and when I mentioned something to this effect he said, “How do you know you haven’t made a typo in a variable name?”

…

My mind just kind of spun for a second on that one for a second. I guess I’ve been in Java land for so long that the concept of having such a thing exist for more than a few seconds just doesn’t enter my brain. I mean first off, the IDE will bitch at you, because it can’t compile it, and even if you’re not using an IDE the compiler will bitch at you. I just responded that “I use a compiled language so that’s never something I have to worry about.”

Now, as many of you know I’m still a huge fan of languges like Perl and Ruby so I work in them fairly often. And I still say that it’s not worth your time writing tests for your getters and setters even in them because unlike Java these languages don’t have IDEs that happily spit out a getter and setter for every variable in your class regardless of if you need it or not. As a result, you only create the ones you need. And if you need them, then they’re going to be used, and if they’re used, you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll see the results of any typos show up really quickly when you test the methods that actually do something noteworthy, because they’ll use the getters and setters (otherwise why did you write them?) and either blow up when the compiler hits them or not work as expected, which is why you’re writing a test.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Hadoop ( an overview ) August 16, 2007

I’ve been trying to get my head around what exactly Hadoop is, how one would use it, and how I can take advantage of it. Well it turns out that Hadoop is a lot more than just an open source Java implementation of MapReduce. It’s also an entire supporting infrastructure for replicating data and intelligently distributing your MapReduces across your cluster.

Knowing that I’m not the only one wishing there was a single document with all the Hadoop and MapReduce basics, I wrote one. Or, more accurately, I summarized the info on various pages into one. Enjoy, and let me know if it was useful to you.

P.S. The really short version is that if you have large data sets/files that need mining, and lots of computers (or a willingness to run your data through Amazon’s EC2 and S3) Hadoop is worth checking out. I’ll try installing it this weekend and write up my notes for you.

Popularity: 4% [?]

How Borders made me into a regular customer August 11, 2007

How Borders made me into a regular customer

or How Barnes & Nobles Screwed up and lost a loyal customer.



Let� me set the stage. Up until roughly one year ago I was a Barnes &
Noble shopper. The only reason I’d go into a Borders was if there didn’t happen
to be a B&N around. And then, while I was checking out at a Borders one day
the cashier said “Do you have a
Borders Rewards
card?”

“No” I said, intending to blow it off like all the other useless “customer
loyalty” cards that get pushed on you until she said something along the lines
of “All I’d need is your e-mail address and you’ll get discounts and coupons.”



It was the just asking for an e-mail address that did it. It free. It’s fast, so
I won’t annoy the people behind me in line, and worst case scenario I could
always just filter their e-mails into the trash. So I signed up. Now, every week
they send me an e-mail with a coupon (usually 20 - 25% off), some discount, and
announcements of large new releases. You can get the e-mail monthly or only when
you’ve accrued Borders Bucks if you want. If I forget to bring in the coupon
they usually have one behind the counter that they’ll scan for me when I present
my Borders Rewards card. And, for every $150 I spend they send me $5 in “Borders
Bucks”, essentially a $5 off coupon. Considering that programming books are
always $40+ and I read a lot of sci-fi / fantasy I actually get them. Plus,
since I know that the prices are essentially the same at Borders and B&N but
shopping at Borders will get me coupons my shopping has totally reversed. Now I
only shop at B&N if there isn’t a Borders around. Oh, and in case I’m really
screwed for a good book store Borders happens to own Waldenbooks and my Borders
Rewards card works there too.



And that happened about a month ago. I forget what I was looking for but my
local Borders didn’t have it so I went over to B&N and when I went to check
out they asked me if I had a B&N Member Card. “No” I said, thinking maybe
I’d have an excuse to start shopping at B&N again, “It’s only $25 ,” he said
“and you get ….”



Twenty Five Dollars! Twenty Five Dollars! Now… let me think. Borders = Free
& gives me discounts. On the other hand I could give B&N $25 and get the
same discounts and… well… nothing. I’d just be giving the $25. Needless to
say I didn’t take the offer. But there was another side effect that I don’t
think B&N thought about. Now I don’t want to shop at B&N because I know
that B&N is trying to screw it’s customers out of $25 for something Borders
was happy to give me for free.



Borders wants my business and is willing to give me discounts, and an occasional
$5 in exchange for my patronage. Barnes and Noble wants to charge me for the
privilege of getting discounts. Given those two options which would you choose?
Now I don’t shop at Borders just because of the discounts, now I shop at Borders
because they know a good deal more about
Treating
Customer Right than B&N does.



If you don’t have a Borders Rewards card I highly recommend you
go get one
now. It’s quick, easy, free, and the e-mails aren’t obnoxious.



P.S. I’m not opposed to paid membership / discount programs. There are some
businesses where they work well. Costco is a great example. I even did it in an
old online business. We charged $10 for membership and I made damn sure that the
average customer would get way more than $10 in savings. But, in the case of my
old co. and Costco there wasn’t another company out there offering the exact
same discounts, or better, for free. To try and charge people an annual fee for
something they can get from an equally placed competitor is bullshit and shows
that you don’t really care about your customers, just getting into their
wallets.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Connections August 9, 2007

There’s an interesting educational series called Connections which follows the
circuitous paths of history and fills your brain with interesting facts.
But,� while I do enjoy watching it, it’s premise drives me nuts because of
how amazingly tenuous some of the “connections” are. So, just to make sure I
wasn’t an idiot, I took notes through a couple of episodes. Here’s what I
learned in the episode called New Harmony. I may misspell some of the places and
people and be slightly off in my understanding of any of this but please bear
with me. At least I learned stuff.



Singapore is the cleanest modern city thanks in no small part to it’s ginormous
incinerator which is controlled by microchips which were discovered when
Shockley found that if you add impurities to crystals you get extra electrons
which led to the creation of the transistor without which we wouldn’t have
microchips. Now Schockley made this discovery� with a crystal called
Germanium (remember this for later) which was discovered by a German named
Vinkler who also invented industrial air filters, the descendents of which clean
the air in Singapore’s incinerator.



But, Vinkler while a great mineralogist was really in the business of selling
cobalt which is used to make blue dye which was in demand to make fake Ming
vases because the real ones were too damn expensive. Ming vases are white
porcelain with cobalt blue pictures on them. Cobalt because it’s one of the few
things that can withstand the heat required to fire porcelain.



Now the Chinese discovered cobalt when they went to Istanbul which was at the
end of the Silk Road. In Istanbul they used cobalt on tiles in mosaics for
anything really important like the incredibly famous mosque called The Blue
Mosque of Istanbul (Isopia?) where they hired the greatest tile artists to make
it beautiful no expense spared (thus all the blue tile) and cover up the fact
that the Christians had actually built it and copy a lot of great Christian
mosaic work that displayed the glory of Byzantium along the way. Now these
Christians were actually an underground sect (literally at times) around that
point in time and weren’t given legitimacy until The Donation of Constantine
when Constantine gave the west to the Pope and thus legitimized him.



But, about a thousand years later the document on which The Donation of
Constantine was written was exposed as a fake (probably by the Vatican) by a guy
named Vinkler who surprisingly found himself not dead thanks to a local
Godfather to whom a lot of people owed favors including a Portuguese guy named
Martens who was the head of the Oceanic Exploration Agency which was roughly
what you’d get if you combined NASA with the Defense Department. And they were
the only ones who knew how to “run up the latitudes” thanks to a nifty invention
that only they had called a Quadrant. This meant they could intentionally leave
sight of land and not worry about never being able to find home again.



Well, one Portuguese accidentally went a bit too far west and hit Brazil which
the Portuguese colonized with Jews who wanted to get away from persecution
(again) but eventually The Inquisition made it to Brazil and many of those Jews
headed to Holland where they became diamond merchants.



One of the diamond merchants had a son who was really into optics and made some
really nice lenses which got the interest of the English Royal Society who came
over to check them out and see what else was going on in Holland. They came
across a guy with a 250x microscope who’d discovered and documented that there
were micro-organisms everywhere!



Word of this got round to Switzerland where Byron, Shelly, and Bryce (a child at
the time) where having dinner and ended up discussing them. One thing led to
another and someone mentioned that a scientist had recently galvanized pasteur
and brought it back to life. This got Shelly’s wife in a tizzy and she went and
wrote Frankenstein.



Except Frankenstein wasn’t just an attack on mucking about where we had no
business. It was also a subtle attack on the technology of the industrial
revolution which she felt was ruining people’s lives thanks in no small part to
the beliefs of her socialist father.



Her father happened to be friends with a guy who made a workers paradise in his
factory in New Lennik Scotland which was way too revolutionary for its time and
left him depressed that he’d never be able to get anywhere with the idea. Until
a colony came up for sale in Indiana which he bought with the financial backing
of a guy named William Maclure who was quite inspired by the factory and was all
into the idea of creating a socialist commune which they called New Harmony
Indiana.



Maclure happened to be a geologist who made the first geological map of the
fledgling United States and found some Germanium deposits which happened to be
the same mineral that was used in the first transistors that led to microchips
and Singapore being what it is today.





To summarize: microchip from transistor made with germanium discovered by a
German who sold cobalt for fake Ming vases. Ming era potters found cobalt in
Istanbul which has a great mosque which was a cover up for Christian works which
became legitimate by a The Donation of Constantine which a thousand years later
was exposed as a fake by a guy who wasn’t killed thanks to a Godfather who also
helped out the head of the Portuguese Oceanic Exploration Agency which had great
navigational tech and three years later “discovered” Brazil where their Jews
happily ran away to until the Inquisition caught up with them, at which point
many of them moved to Holland and one of them had a child who made great lenses
which caught the interest of the English Royal Society that found a dude with a
microscope who told them about micro-organisms which they in turn told everybody
about. Word got around to Mary Shelly who wrote a book that most people don’t
realize is an attack on industrialization thanks to her socialist father who had
a friend who started a commune in Indiana with the financial backing of a
geologist who found some Germanium deposits in the U.S. and Germanium is what
was used in the first transistor.



While the story is cool, some of those connections are Damn tenuous.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Who cares how long the test is?! August 8, 2007

I was speaking with someone at BarCamp and they suggested that your unit test
should never be longer than the thing it’s testing. His thinking was that if
your test is longer than what it’s testing then your tests will eventually need
a test framework to make sure they’re correct. This was of course one of his
excuses for not writing tests at all. And, superficially at least, there is some
validity to his argument, but it’s based on a flawed premise. It’s based on the
premise that the code you write in your test suite is complex enough that it too
could be brittle, and if you ever find this happening it’s a sure sign that
you’re doing in wrong.� Let me explain:



Unit Tests should be simple… really
simple. Each test routine should basically have these parts:

• An instance of the thing you’re testing.
• If it requires parameters in it’s constructor or in the method you’re
  testing you create some
  mock
  objects (NOT STUBS) to pass it.
• A series of assertions to test that what you thought would happen did
  happen.
  

Instantiating an object is not a complex operation. It’s usually something along
the lines of

Bar myBar = new Bar();

You don’t have to worry about that breaking, normally because
constructors don’t tend to do much. If your constructor does have any complexity
happening under the covers then you’ve got a unit test for it somewhere else and
thus you don’t have to worry about it.



Creating a mock object not only avoids potential complexity but utilizes a well
tested library so you don’t need to test that either. Yeah it may take a few
lines but it isn’t complex or brittle and it is guaranteed to work exactly as
you tell it to.



Assertions are just

assertEquals(”camels”, myBar.favoriteAnimal());

// or maybe…

assertTrue(myBar.isSimplistic());

First off, the assertions themselves are methods from a unit testing suite, you
can rest assured that they not only work correctly but have full unit test
coverage. So you don’t have to worry about them. Second, they’re brain dead
simple. There’s no logic, so there’s nothing to break. The only thing here with
the potential to blow up is the methods you’re testing and that’s why you wrote
the test in the first place.



Your unit test should have absolutely no business logic in it. If it does then
you probably need to refactor your code.



So, lets look at a simple concrete example of why the length of your method is
irrelevant to the length of your test.

Most of you are familiar with QuickSort. It’s a simple and fast method to sort a
list of things. You can probably write a QuickSort algorithm in under 15 lines
of code. So what happens if you pass your quicksort algorithm a list of twenty
shuffled items. You’d want to test that it correctly sorted all twenty of them
wouldn’t you? Considering that this is a test you know exactly what the input is
and exactly what the output should be, but there’s only one way to really test
it. You have to check every slot of the returned list and make sure it’s got the
correct item in it. So that’s at least one line to set up the list you’re going
to pass to your quicksort method, one line to pass it in, and twenty lines to
test the results. Something like this:

SortingUtilities sortUtils = new SortUtils();

String[] unsortedMen = new String[]{”tom”, “dick”, “Harry”……and 17 more};

String[] sortedMen = sortUtils.myQuickSortMethod(unsortedMen);

assertEquals(”dick”, sortedMen[0]);

assertEquals(”Harry”, sortedMen[1]); // case insensitivity testing too

assertEquals(”tom”, sortedMen[2]);

// and so on for another 16 lines

Grand total of 23 lines plus 2 more to start and end the test method itself,
plus you’d probably want to break that list of unsortedMen down into multiple
lines so it would be readable. All that just to test a fifteen line method. For
good measure you might want to add a line to test that the size of the array
that came out is the same as the size of the array that went in, just to make
sure that nothing was accidentally duplicated in there. But nothing,
nothing, in that list even remotely needs
to be tested itself because it’s all brain dead simple. There’s nothing complex.
There’s no business logic, there’s nothing you have to worry about. The fact
that it happens to have more lines than the method it’s testing is totally
irrelevant.



The only excuse I’ll hear for not wanting to do this is that you’re too damn
lazy. At least that’s honest. But claiming that the length of your test suite
has any relevance to the length of the method under test is just plain ignorant.



You’re a programmer. Use your brain. Don’t make poorly thought out, half-assed
excuses not to do the right thing. If you’re going to avoid doing the right
thing at least be honest about why you’re doing it. Laziness sucks, but at least
it’s honest, and since people don’t generally like thinking of themselves as
lazy it has the potential to kick your ass into gear. And, because it always
comes up, the excuse that writing all those lines of test code “slows you down”
or “takes too long” is bullshit because we all know that the vast majority of
time spent on any project is in debugging and maintenance and when you’ve got
good tests that time is dramatically
reduced. You end up saving far more time than you spent writing your tests, and
your end result is just more bug free and stable. If typing out twenty lines of
brain dead assertions takes you more than a minute and a half you need to get
off your butt and take a typing course.

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