A few weeks back I wrote a post on Working Effectively with Legacy Code, a book by Michael Feathers. At the time I lamented that even though I accepted Michael’s definition of legacy code (code without tests), I wasn’t doing much about it – I hadn’t written any tests at work. Today I wanted to follow up on this because the last two weeks have gone much better – I’ve been writing unit tests. I was given the job of rewriting a particularly hairy module and this was simply too good an opportunity to pass up. I’m not doing TDD yet, and I certainly haven’t written as many tests as I would like, but its a start.
Rather than using a mocking framework, I’ve been hand rolling stubs. I believe that the other developers will have an easier time understanding the tests if I use manual stubs. Mocking frameworks are certainly convenient but as Michael demonstrates in his book, they are not necessary per se. So far I haven’t found this particularly painful and I think its a sound approach for introducing automated unit testing. I must admit that the fact that I am working on a .NET 2.0 project made this decision easier. I learned Rhino Mocks using the .NET 3.5 API and I think I would have a hard time going without the sweetness that lambda expressions provide.
Writing that very first test is a bit of a barrier, but its only a mental one. I was fortunate to have a nice piece of work come along and give me a push. Hopefully it will not be necessary the next time I find myself faced with legacy code – I intend to write that first test without a moment of hesitation. Its all downhill from there.
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