Re:Lean Testing or Why Unit Tests Are Worse Than You Think
by GuB-42 on Monday July 16, 2018 @07:02AM
(#17540280)
It reminds me of a project I worked on. It was for critical embedded software in aircraft ("make an emergency landing" critical, not "we are all dead"). Obviously, the code is certified, with specific requirements (DO-178B level B) and third party audits.
And we made the choice not to have unit tests. Everything was done through integration tests. What made up for it is that we had very good traceability. So for we knew which lines of code were related to which requirement and which test. So if we changed some code, we knew which test to run, and if a test fails, we knew where to look at.
For the edge cases, we had the ability to inject data directly into memory, triggering the otherwise unreachable error conditions, and the very last cases where done through code analysis (we needed 100% coverage).
And we made the choice not to have unit tests. Everything was done through integration tests. What made up for it is that we had very good traceability. So for we knew which lines of code were related to which requirement and which test. So if we changed some code, we knew which test to run, and if a test fails, we knew where to look at.
For the edge cases, we had the ability to inject data directly into memory, triggering the otherwise unreachable error conditions, and the very last cases where done through code analysis (we needed 100% coverage).