I thought I would share a quick experience since I had not posted in a couple of weeks. Last Friday I had my head phones on and fingers flying on the key board. I have been really pumped to write code because my coworker has shifted my paradigm from hacking to test driven development. I am still learning this approach but I feel it is the right approach and more importantly FUN!
So I created some factories that managed the data. I created some tests against the factories to validate that the tests would get the correct data from the factories. I then wrote a data driven script. The script iterates through numerous key words and performs a comparative test between the UI and the back-end XML generation.
When I was done every test passed with flying colors. I was stoked. The next morning it occurred to me that perhaps I should test a negative condition and force the test to fail. I fed the script all kinds of data that should have resulted in a failure. The test passed every single time. What the heck is going on?
After a long pause I recognized that the URLs and http requests I was building were flawed. It was time to consult the client. After a couple of quick questions the requests were corrected and the test script worked as expected.
So the lesson I share with you is always and I mean always do a karate chop on your test in order to make sure it fails when it is expected to fail.
Continue to chop the code!
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