Why do software engineering lectures not teach us about testing? If I were asked to teach software engineering (which TBH I shouldn't be qualified to do just yet) I'd start with testing.

[–] Anders429@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I've always thought it weird that the intro CS course I took at my university didn't even mention unit testing. After being in the industry for several years, it's become obvious that the majority of what I do is just writing tests.

[–] philm@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

And then there's me, who almost never writes unit tests 😬

(With strong typing I can minimize explicit tests, and I like to iterate fast, but I guess it really depends on what you're developing, backend in production that is not allowed to fail, is probably something different than a game)

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

Strong typing doesn't prevent the need for tests. It can certainly catch some issues (and I don't like dynamically typed languages as a result), but there's no replacement for unit testing. So much refactoring is only safe because of rigorous test coverage. I can't begin to tell you how many times a "safe" refactoring actually broke something and it was only thanks to unit tests that I found it.

If code is doing anything non-trivial, tests are pretty vital for ensuring it works as intended (and for ensuring you don't write too much code before you realize something doesn't work). Sure, you can manually test, but often manual testing can have a hard time testing edge cases. And manual testing won't help you prevent regressions, which is usually the biggest reason to write unit tests. If you have a big, complicated system worked on by more than one person, tests can be critical for ensuring other people (who often have no idea how your code works) don't break your test. Plus your own future changes.

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