TITLE: Those Silly Tests
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 04, 2013  2:41 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I love this passage by Mark Dominus in
<A HREF="http://blog.plover.com/prog/intervals.html">
    Overlapping Intervals</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 This was yet another time when I felt slightly foolish as
 I wrote the automated tests, assuming that the time and
 effort I spent on testing this trivial function would be
 time and effort thrown away on nothing -- and then they
 detected a real fault.  Someday perhaps I'll stop feeling
 foolish writing tests for functions like this one; until
 then, many cases just like this one will help me remember
 that I must write the tests even though I feel foolish
 doing it.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Even excellent programmers feel silly writing tests sometimes.
But they also benefit from writing them.  Dominus was saved
here by his test-writing habit, or by his sense of right and
wrong.

Helping students develop that habit or that moral sense is a
challenge.  Even so, I rarely come across a situation where my
students or I write or run too many tests.  I regular encounter
cases where we write or run too few.

Dominus's blog entry also a great passage on a larger lesson
from that coding experience.  In the end, his clever solution
to a tricky problem results not from "just thinking" but from
deeper thought: from "applying carefully-learned and practiced
technique".  That's an important form of thinking, too.
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