Creating robust tests with Isolator V7

The problem with unit tests is that they keep on breaking…

Obviously that’s not entirely correct, nevertheless I had the pleasure of hearing the sentence above numerous times. It’s true – unit tests do tend to fail and we prefer that they fail only when a regression occurs – when something that used to work stopped working, because that’s the reason they’re there in the first place.
The problem is that there are several instances when a test stops compiling due to requirement change or refactoring. consider the following test code:

[Test]
public void Add_AddTowNumbersInCalculator_ReturnResult()
{
    var fakeDataAccess = Isolate.Fake.Instance<dataAccess>();
    Isolate.WhenCalled(() => fakeDataAccess.Save(null)).WillReturn(true);

    var customer = new Customer(fakeDataAccess);

    //...

    var result = customer.Save();

    Assert.That(result, Is.True);
}

Simple. Now what happens when we need to change the Customer c’tor? – let’s say that it was decided that every customer should have a valid address the developer implement that requirement – like this:

[Test]
public void Add_AddTowNumbersInCalculator_ReturnResult()
{
    var fakeDataAccess = Isolate.Fake.Instance<dataAccess>();
    var fakeAddress = Isolate.Fake.Instance<Address>();
    Isolate.WhenCalled(() => fakeDataAccess .Save(null)).WillReturn(true);

    var customer = new Customer(fakeAddress, dataAccess);

    //...

    var result = customer.Save();

    Assert.That(result, Is.True);
}

What if I already wrote a few dozen tests – what can I do?

Create overloaded c’tor one with parameter and one parameterless
Add a default value to the c’tor (.NET 4.0)
Write all of the tests again – from scratch
Delete your tests and never attempt unit testing your code ever again
Create a factory method to instantiate Customer at your tests
Quit your job and move to another country

All of the above are valid options (ok, some of these are valid options) they would work great for some of the scenarios. unfortunately most of the time usually you end up re-writing a lot of code each time such a change happen. Adding parameters that you usually do not care about and so you fake them or pass some default value over and over again.
In fact on my team this problem (needing to fix a lot of tests each time the c’tor signature change) was so severe that one of the developers took it upon himself to create a class that creates object just for the test with all of the parameters faked.
Luckily there is another way: the new Isolator V7 that was released a few weeks ago and one new feature got me exited (no not the auto-test-runner) – it’s The new API calls: Isolate.Fake.Dependencies and Isolate.GetFake.
Using the new API I’ve fixed the test to work like this:

[Test]
public void Add_AddTowNumbersInCalculator_ReturnResult()
{
    var customer = Isolate.Fake.Dependencies<Customer>();

    var fakeDataAccess = Isolate.GetFake<DataAccess>(customer);
    Isolate.WhenCalled(() => fakeDataAccess.Save(null)).WillReturn(true);
    //...

    var result = customer.Save();

    Assert.That(result, Is.True);
}

I just tell Isolator to fake all dependencies and “grab” the only one that interest me at this test and change it’s behavior – simple.
And now my test won’t break due to c’tor changes.

Happy coding…

Labels: .NET, C#, NUnit, Tools, Typemock