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Discussion on: One Web Architect's Core Beliefs

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Nathan Fritz • Edited

We've disagreed on this before. And to be fair, I'm not afraid to put coverage exemptions around conditionals that are a little over-defensive and configuration-specific lines. That said, I agree that many types of projects don't need 100% test coverage. Data-centered open source libraries and API services are most of what I write, and in those cases, I find it advantageous to have 100% coverage, at least on paper.

My games usually have little to no tests, as the desired behavior is an emergent property of several systems working together, and so it makes more sense to manually test. Even in the web world, most front-end UI rendering logic isn't worth testing, nor is it worth re-testing your APIs from a set of client tests.

In any case, with APIs and open source libraries, I find bugs by working toward 100% coverage, and I'm more confident to do refactoring later. It's also good marketing to legitimately have that 100% coverage badge on an open source library.

We can continue to disagree on this, but I think we understand each other's views pretty well. Hopefully, someday, we get to work together and butt heads on issues like this for code that we share.

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Dave Cridland

I wonder, though, whether 100% coverage - and coverage in general - is a measure of how easily the software could be checked automatically, rather than how well it is. I think the thing that winds me up so much about coverage as a metric is that distinction seems to be missed.