Tests are also code that you need to maintain. Delete tests that don’t have any value anymore. Nothing wasteful about that.
tcoopman
sodapopcan
Another +1 for throwing away such tests. I often treat TDD like REPL-driven development where instead of having to press up a bunch of times and then enter to re-run the test, I have it in a file and can just press one key-combo to run it. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that I need to keep that around once things are working if it’s low value. That said, I’ve definitely felt attached to those tests before (and it still happens).
I also find having mountains of unit tests to incredibly daunting and I have a feeling that that is what contributes to a lot of anti-testing sentiments. I strive to only have tests that describe business value because I actually want to read them. If you have lower-level unit tests that always pass and are covered elsewhere anyway, just throw them away. As mentioned, there is a cost to all code that is kept around.
More on topic: I don’t really want to head-to-head with pragdave, but the module thing he is describing is similar to what I was describing. Since I’m pro-dynamic programming, even if there are some semblance of types, I feel that some social contracts in code are OK—like, if there is a GenServer API available then obviously you should always use that, even if the impls are public! That’s maybe an unpopular opinion, though.
And of course, to reiterate what has been said numerous times, there are no set rules.
I say this all the time and there’s no way any of us here will ever live to see the day where there would be set rules (if that’s even possible). I always that I wonder how many hundreds of years people argued over whether a rock or a heavy stick made a better hammer before the modern hammer was standardized.
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waseigo
I don’t mean to “necrobump” this thread, but I just want to express how thankful I am to everyone who posted in this thread. It’s a gold mine of opinions and nuance.
I was recently faced with the dilemma of whether I should be testing private functions, and this thread was part of my exploration.
I wrote a blog post that summarizes my finding, though I don’t know if it’s 100% correct, or somewhat opinionated: Things I've realized about testing Elixir code
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