Hacker News with Generative AI: Unit Testing

The Big TDD Misunderstanding (2022) (linkedrecords.com)
Rumors have it that the term “unit” in “unit test” originally referred to the test itself, not to a unit of the system under test. The idea was that the test could be executed as one unit and does not rely on other tests running upfront (see here and here). Another contradictive perspetive is this one: “The unit to be tested is the entire point of confusion and debate.

Software Development, Testing, Software Engineering, Unit Testing

63 points by WolfOliver 6 days ago | 83 comments

Unit Testing Principles (olano.dev)
This book can help you articulate why the techniques and best practices you’ve been using all along are so helpful. Don’t underestimate this skill. The ability to clearly communicate your ideas to colleagues is priceless. A software developer—even a great one—rarely gets full credit for a design decision if they can’t explain why, exactly, that decision was made.

Software Development, Unit Testing, Communication

22 points by facundo_olano 26 days ago | 6 comments

Diman: a Rust library for checking units of measure at compile time (github.com/Tehforsch)
Diman is a library for zero-cost compile time unit checking.

Rust, Programming Languages, Static Analysis, Unit Testing, Libraries

9 points by fanf2 27 days ago | 0 comments

Empirical Study of Test Generation with LLM's (arxiv.org)
Unit testing is an essential activity in software development for verifying the correctness of software components.

Software Development, Unit Testing, Artificial Intelligence, Research

40 points by nickpsecurity 55 days ago | 36 comments

Writing efficient unit tests in Java (qodo.ai)
Unit testing is like the essential vegetable on a developer’s plate—crucial for a healthy codebase, yet often pushed aside. However, robust Java applications consistently share one common trait: comprehensive test suites that catch bugs before they ever reach production.

Java, Unit Testing, Software Development

5 points by timbilt 91 days ago | 0 comments

Unit Testing Numerical Routines (buchanan.one)
As a prudent programmer, you probably do not consider your code finished until it has passed a rigorous set of unit tests. However, numerical routines such as this one present difficulties for unit testing. How can you be confident the function is correct in general? What if you don't know the expected output? What if the underlying algorithm changes?

Software, Programming, Unit Testing, Numerical Analysis

75 points by boscillator 101 days ago | 42 comments

Unit tests as documentation (thecoder.cafe)
Hello! Let’s continue our series on unit tests by discussing their relation with documentation.