This post was originally published here by Valtech UK consultant Andrew Rendell.

We have two major classifications of automated test in common use for test driven development (TDD):

• Acceptance tests which execute against the application in its fully deployed state.
• Unit tests which typically target a single class and are executed without instantiating a Spring container.
  

The acceptance tests are written in language which should make them accessible outside of the development team. They are used to measure completeness, automatically test environments and provide regression tests. Their usefulness is widely accepted across the team and they tend to be very longevid, i.e. tests that were written a year ago against a particular API are relevant today and will continue to be relevant as long as that API is supported in production. The unit tests are written by developers and will almost certainly never be read by anybody other than the developers or possibly the technical leads. I program using TDD as I find it a natural way to construct software. I personally find that the tests are most useful as I am writing the code, like scaffolding. Once the code is stablized the tests still have a use but are no longer as critical. A refactoring of the application in some future sprint may see those tests be heavily amended or retired. They are not as longevid as the acceptance tests.

I have been reflecting on the usefulness and investment in test code for as long as I had been doing TDD. I had come to a conclusion that whilst acceptance tests are non-negotiable on projects where I have delivery responsibility, perhaps unit tests for TDD are not mandatory in certain situations. I have worked with several developers who are very very good and simply do not see the value in TDD as it is contrary to their own, very effective, development practices. I know in my team right now a couple of the very best developers do not use TDD the way everybody else does. Education and peer pressure has had no effect. They are delivering high quality code as quickly as anybody else. Its hard to force them to do differently - especially when some of them pay lip service to TDD and do have a high test coverage count. I know that they write those tests after they write their code.

In the last few weeks I came across a couple of concrete examples where TDD could have helped those developers deliver better code. In the future I will try and use these examples to persuade others to modify their practice

1. Too many calls to downstream service.

The application in question has a mechanism for determining identity of a client through some network services. Those network services are quite expensive to call. The application endeavors to call them infrequently as is safe and cache identity when is is resolved. We recently found a defect where one particular end point in the application was mistakenly making a call to the identity services. It was not that the developer had made a call in error, it was that the class inheritance structure effectively defaulted to making the call so did so without the developer realizing. The identity returned was never used. I suspect that this code was not built using TDD. If it had been then the developer would have mocked out the identity service (it was a dependency of the class under construction) but would not have set an expectation that the identity service would not have been called. The use of mocks not only to specify what your code should be calling but what it should not be calling is extremely useful. It encourages that top down (from the entry point into the system) approach where you build what you need when you need it.

Its likely that the defect would never have been introduced had the developer been using TDD. As it is we have a application which is making a large number (and it is a large number) of irrelevant calls to a contentious resource. We now have to schedule a patch to production.

Coincidentally, there was an acceptance test for this service, which was passing. This highlights a deficiency in our acceptance tests we have to live with. They test the 'what' but not the 'how'. The tests were running against a fully deployed application which had downstream services running in stub mode. The test proved that functionally the correct result was returned but it had no way of detecting that an additional spurious call to another service had been made during the process.

2. Incorrect error handling

In a recent refactoring exercise we came across a piece of code which expected a class it was calling to through an exception whenever it had an error processing a request. The error recovery in the code in question was quite elaborate and important. Unfortunately, the class being called never threw an exception in the scenarios in question. It had a status object it returned which indicated if corrective action needed to be taken. (It was designed to be used in conjunction with asynchronous message queues where throwing an exception would have introduced unnecessary complexity). The developer could have easily used mock objects and set an expectation that the exception would be thrown and the problem would have remained. But, if TDD was being used and the developer was working top down then the expected behavior of the mocks would have guided the implementation of downstream classes. Nothing is foolproof but I think this manner of working should have caught this quite serious error.

More subjective problems

I have also noted two other potential consequences of having some developers opt out of TDD. I do note that some developers on the team produce code that is more complex than others. It is fine from a cyclomatic complexity perspective but when you try and understand what it is doing you find yourself with a higher WTF count than you would expect. I think (again this is subjective, I have not gathered any empirical evidence) that a lot of the complexity comes from a lack of cohesion in the code. Logic is spread around in a way which made sense to the original developer as they had internalized all the classes concerned. That logic is not obvious to a new pair of eyes. If you are using TDD then this encourages cohesion in classes because it focuses the mind on what the class is responsible for before the developer has to worry about how it delivers those responsibilities.

This is a very subjective point and I would happily agree that several of the team members who do use TDD occasionally produce nasty code. My gut feeling however, is that it happens less often.

One final problem with some of the high flyers not using TDD is that bad practices tend to propagate through the team just as quickly as good ones. I have caught a couple of new joiners following a bad example or simply not using TDD becuase the developer they look to as a mentor is not evangelizing about the technique because they themselves do not buy into the practice. This is a shame as those new joiners often have a greater need of the rigor that TDD imposes than the more experienced developers.