Admentus, Inc.

Business Analysis ♦ Software Development ♦ Application Support

The best developers are always playing with new technologies and bending existing beliefs to try new things. We encourage this kind of exploration in our development team and this is their playground. Feel free to ask questions - we are all here to learn!

Entries Tagged as Unit Testing

Unit Testing Anybody?

Posted on July 30, 2007 in Unit Testing

So, here I am being the good developer and attempting to put together a series of unit tests for a project (the generic data validation engine is actually very close!). I have always appreciated the concept of unit testing and I have no problem doing it for simple little test cases. Where it always tends to get left by the road side is when I run into one of those more complex scenarios that does not fit the mold.

There was just such an occasion last week and I still have not found a way around it – at least one that I like. So, here is the scenario. I have an object whose init method accepts an optional path to an XML configuration file and if received, parses that configuration file into an internal data structure which is a fairly complex series of nested structures and arrays. All is well and good until I went to write a couple of unit tests for this …. I know I should have written them first, but at least they are being written!