If I am healthy, my body may come to rely on being so and forget what to do when I am sick. Therefore, it is better to be sick than to be healthy.
Since I spent
my morning reading reddit and typing comments there instead of writing today's blog post, I'll let you in on this discussion that's going on over there: Larry O'Brien's article
30K application lines + 110K testing lines: Evidence of...? was posted to
this thread on reddit, and the
FUD started to fly. (If you're interested in the subject, there's also a thread about
programmers not getting it, or not wanting to.)
It started with Larry quoting himself on praising extreme programming, and mentioning 110 thousand lines of test code to 30 thousand lines of application code, with the application having been developed in Python. Alan Holub took that as an indictment of dynamic languages, with Larry quoting him as saying:
I want to take exception to the notion that Python is adequate for a real programming project. The fact that 30K lines of code took 110K lines of tests is a real indictment of the language. My guess is that a significant portion of those tests are addressing potential errors that the compiler would have found in C# or Java. Moreover, all of those unnecessary tests take a lot of time to write, time that could have been spent working on the application.
In fact, many people were shocked at the amount of tests compared to code, and that's what the discussion (at least the part I was interested in) centered around. Four times as much test code as application logic is too much. It would shackle you, instilling fear in your heart and soul. No changes would ever be made with that kind of viscosity. Furthermore, tests can provide a false sense of security, a blankie, if you will.
You've got to be kidding. Having a test that will tell you when you broke existing functionality is pressure to avoid changes? To me, that's
liberating!
Contrast that with not having a test to tell you when something broke.
Does it even make sense to say having tests pressures you to avoid changes? Only if you fear having a program that works over having one that you think works.
Let me try a different approach. Take the following simple program:
if (someCondition is true)
do something
else
something else
if (anotherCondition is true)
do another thing
There are four execution paths: One where both
someCondition and
anotherCondition are true, one where they are both false, and one each where one is true and the other isn't.
In other words, we have six lines of code and at least four tests we should write to cover all the cases. If each test is just a single line, we still need to write the method names and end lines, so that would give us three lines per test - for a total of twelve lines of test code.
The test code size is already double the number of lines in our application code for this simple, six line program with four execution paths.
How many execution paths are in a 30 thousand line program?
Seeing as the number of execution paths in code is more likely to grow
exponentially than linearly with each new line that gets written, 110 thousand lines of test code isn't actually all that much.
Further, the solution to the blankie problem is not "have fewer tests," it is to recognize that passing the tests is a necessary -
not sufficient - condition of working software.
Following the blankie argument to its logical conclusion - that fewer tests mean you write better code because you are more careful - we should have no tests.
In fact part of the reason we want the tests is that we can make changes to the code with less fear of unknowingly breaking existing functionality or introducing defects in the software.
In the end,
if someone is using the tests as a tool to do wrong, there is something wrong with the person, not the test. They will find another way to do wrong, even if we remove the tests from their arsenal.
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