Developer Guide: How to Write Great Unit Tests

ThinkUp contributors should use a test-driven development approach.

ThinkUp uses the SimpleTest unit tester tool to create thorough and complete unit tests for all new and modified code. If your code doesn’t have corresponding tests, it won’t get merged into the ThinkUp master.

ThinkUp tests are located in the /ThinkUp/tests/ folder.

ThinkUp Testing Best Practices

This list is a work in progress.

• DAO Tests: When testing an insert or update to data, don’t rely on the DAO’s get method to verify the update. Instead, use raw SQL to retrieve the inserted/updated row and assert it works. Related mailing list thread.

• Crawler plugin tests: When testing data returned by a web service API, do not query the live API in your tests. Instead, mock a class that returns all possible values that you expect from the API, and write tests against those values. For example, the mock TwitterOAuth class reads test Twitter data from files stored in the testdata directory, instead of hitting Twitter.com live.