TDD Anti-Patterns

It's a bit old now but I picked up a piece of code from a supplier that had the Generous Leftovers anti-pattern and it reminded me that every developer should have this list printed off and study it regularly.

Check out James Carr's TDD Anti-Patterns.

The Free Ride is probably the most common one and developers need to refer to "one assertion per test" to try and avoid this.

I think The Mockery is quite possibly the hardest anti-pattern to avoid mainly because we need a leap forward in the way Mock libaries work (what I call Quite Mocks). This will allow "one expectation per example". RSpec (used in the tutorial) has its own mock libary that supports Quite Mocks by passing a null_object argument. Unfortunately for us .NET developers out there such support doesn't exist. I have requested it on the NMock feature requests board but in the mean time you can create a helper class which uses reflection to stub out all the methods/properties you are not testing.

I am planning to 'translate' Dave Astels article to C# 'cos Ruby can be a bit tough on the eyes if you aren't used to it and as I mentioned already you need Quite Mocks (which don't exist) to really get it to work.

In the mean time I made my own contribution to the TDD Anti-Patterns with:

The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party
This is one of those test cases that seems to test a whole party of objects without testing any specific one. This is often found in poorly designed systems that cannot use mocks or stubs and as a result end up testing the state and behaviour of every peripheral object in order to ensure the object under test is working correctly.