Yesterday, I read one of the teaser chapters of Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit. It was a very interesting chapter, so I eventually ordered the book. \

According to the reviews and from the looks of the table of contents, it doesn’t talk too much about JUnit, but instead about general unit testing methodology in general which is what I want, as I don’t do Java programming unless I can avoid it (another book on my bookshelf is btw Beyond Java, and although I think the author believes a bit much in XML as a must for the future, I feel that most of the conclusions in that book are something I can agree with - Java is on its way out, except as a niche language for “enterprise” applications. I don’t know what “enterprise” is supposed to mean - “expensive and slow”, perhaps?

Anyway, today at work, I had to rewrite a function that reads /etc/ldap.conf and parses out some LDAP server connection info. I had to read in more data, and change its API slightly as it was limited in the amount of data it could return. Inspired by the book, I started by writing some unit tests (using PyUnit) and then added more as I added features to the function.

Being able to run the tests while adding features, making sure that adjustments to parse and return a new type of data didn’t break old data, made me fee happy and productive. Having to think about what kind of data should be returned and therefore tested also gave a better and more complete design.

In short - I’ll be writing more unit tests from now on. I’m sure the book (when it arrives) will give me plenty of inspiration. \

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