Building upon my previous post and the trick of being specific in the values the code respects, one pattern that I’ve noticed which can easily lead in many false positive tests is sharing a constant value between production and test code.
If the test code reads the value from the production, any change that was done by mistake will not affect the test which will continue to pass!
21 yeas of age
Lets say that we have two services, one checks if a customer can enter a casino and the other if she can buy alcohol. For both cases the law states that the minimum legal age is 21 years old.
The code has a configuration file, a domain and two modules for each service:
As you can see the tests consume the minimum age directly from the production code but the test suite passes, life is good.
Then one day, the law changes and the minimum legal age for entering a casino drops to 20 years! Simple change, not much of a challenge for the old timers so the task is being given to the new teammate who does not know all modules yet and is also a junior software engineer.
She sees the test, changes the value in the name to 20, sees the config, changes the constant’s value to 20, runs the test suite, everything passes, life is good! Only that it isn’t because the casino’s software now allows selling alcohol to 20 year olds!
Keep them separate
If the test code did not use the production’s code
then, after changing the constant’s value, the test suite would fail alerting the software engineer that something has broken forcing her to figure it out and craft another solution.
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