Object Mentor Blog: X Tests are not X Tests

X Tests are not X Tests

Michael Feathers — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:48:00 -0500

Testing is a slippery subject, and it’s reasonably hard to talk about for one simple reason: the nomenclature is chaotic. Years ago, I went to a summit with some testing gurus. I was one of the lone developers there and I asked about the taxonomy of testing. Cem Kaner, Bret Pettichord, Brian Marick, and James Bach went through it for us on a flipchart, and it was a nightmare. You can name tests after their scope: (unit, component, system), their place in the development process (smoke, integration, acceptance, regression), their focus (performance, functional) their visibility (white box, black box), the role of the people writing them (developer, customer).. The list goes on. There are far more than I can remember.

Why is it so confusing? There are are a couple of reasons. One is that different communities have developed different nomenclature over time. But, let’s face it, that’s true in most fields. The thing which makes testing nomenclature worse is that the tests themselves aren’t all that different, or at least, they are often not different enough for us to for us to distinguish them without being told. Yes, we can tell the difference between a unit test and an acceptance test in most systems, but really there is no force which prevents tests of different types from bleeding through into each other. Often the “type” of a test is more like an attribute: “here I have a blackbox smoke test, written by a developer for component integration.” In the end, all we have are tests and each of them can serve purposes beyond the purpose we originally intended.

Earlier today, I read a blog by Stephen Walther: TDD Tests are not Unit Tests. In it, he draws some distinctions between various types of testing. It’s great that he wrote it because it’s nice for us to have mental categories for these things, but we have to remember is that they really are just categories. We get to choose how distinct they will be. When I write code, most of my TDD tests end up being the same as my unit tests. I find value in forcing that overlap, and in general, I think overlapping test purposes are great to the degree that the purposes don’t conflict. You get more for less that way.

I don’t see any remedy for the muddle of test types. We will continue to make up terms to distinguish tests. We’ll just have to remember that the types are labels, not bins.

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