Developer Testing is Habit Forming (and Habit Changing)

A while back Tim Ottinger wrote a great article about how "Testing Will Challenge Your Conventions". Among the points that really hit home for me were -

1. "Interfaces suddenly seem like a really good idea...". Mock objects can be so useful when used correctly that creating an interface is often the first thing I do.
   
2. "Singletons and static methods no longer seem like a great way to do work...". As I hope everyone knows by now the Singleton pattern is way overrated and makes writing truly isolated unit tests very hard.
3. "Private makes less sense...". I still struggle with making a method public just for testing but sometimes there is no other way. Whenever I find the need to do so, I give my design a hard look to make sure it is as good as it should be.
4. "You need to be able to pass a class everything it might need at construction time...". To write isolated unit tests your classes cannot configure themselves. Of course long constructor parameter lists can be a problem but I can use the builder pattern as one way to counter that.
5. "Smaller methods are the norm." When I think about the size of methods I write now compared to a few years ago I am amazed at how small the methods are now. It is getting to where I can't read or don't have the patience to read methods over 10 to 15 lines long.

That's a few of my thoughts go read the whole things for yourself.