Category: Testing

Vladimir Khorikov argues that you should not unit test private methods:

When your tests start to know too much about the internals of the system under test (SUT), that leads to false positives during refactoring. Which means they won’t act as a safety net anymore and instead will impede your refactoring efforts because of the necessity to refactor them along with the implementation details they are bound to. Basically, they will stop fulfilling their main objective: providing you with the confidence in code correctness.

When it comes to unit testing, you need to follow this one rule: test only the public API of the SUT, don’t expose its implementation details in order to enable unit testing. Your tests should use the SUT the same way its regular clients do, don’t give them any special privileges. Here you can read more about what an implementation detail is and how it is different from public API: link.

In the database world, this is one reason why I like using stored procedures:  they give the equivalent of a public API for database code, so you can write tests for them.

Gavin Campbell combines tSQLt along with a Visual Studio database test project:

There are a few ways of getting the tSQLt objects deployed to where they are needed for testing, the way I use most often is basically this one, whereby we create a .dacpac of just the tSQLt objects (or use one we made earlier!), and create a second database project with a Database Reference of type “Same Database” to the project we are trying to test, and a reference to our tSQLt .dacpac. The .dacpac file needs to be somewhere in our source folders, as it will be added by path. We also need a reference to the master database, as this is required to build the tSQLt project.

I see the two tools as serving completely different purposes:  tSQLt is a decent unit test framework, whereas a Visual Studio database project is a decent integration test framework.  It’s interesting that Gavin was able to combine them here but aside from having a common test runner, my inclination would be to keep them separated.

Randolph West explains why it’s important to have a test environment separate from your development and production environments:

Some companies I’ve worked with have different forms of testing environments, including QA (Quality Assurance), IAT (Internal Acceptance Testing), and UAT (User Acceptance Testing). What they are called doesn’t matter, so long as they exist.

In a typical IT deployment, whether using Waterfall, Agile, or other development methodologies of the month, it pays to have a basic development → test → production deployment path.

Randolph explains it in some detail but one of the big benefits for me is that you can make sure that deployment process works before deployment time.  Knowing that your checked-in scripts won’t break the deployment (because they didn’t break the CI build and release) makes the release process a lot less stressful.