Testability

A fundamental concept that unites the chapters of this book is testability. When code is testable, we have confidence in its architecture and implementation. We can test it thoroughly with ease. Bugs are quickly detected and easily fixed. The first step to improving testability in an application is to establish a natural feedback loop between application code and test code, using signals from testing to improve application code. The energy devoted to writing complex tests for untestable code should be channeled into making the code more testable, allowing simpler tests to be written. With this feedback loop and focus on testability, tests contribute to code quality and application reliability.

Testability is not a binary quality. When looking at a given software system, we should ask, "How testable is this?", rather than trying to categorize it as testable or not testable. This requires judgment and common sense. As our features and priorities evolve, so must our criteria for testability. For example, let's consider a new web application with a small number of users, which has all kinds of automated tests for important features but none for testing performance under high load. This system can be considered to have high testability as long as we have few users and performance is not yet a concern. Once the web application becomes very popular and we need to serve millions of requests a day, we would have to change our judgment to say that the system now has very low testability. What use are all the tests that aren't related to performance if none of our users can reach our website because we cannot serve requests fast enough?

Testability should be achieved with efficiency. We need to figure out which features to test and not spend too much effort on tests that don't offer much value. As with testability, efficiency is not static and we must adjust the criteria for it as software evolves.

We can define testability as the degree to which a system can be verified to work as expected. At the smallest level, closest to the inpidual lines of code that make up our software, we are concerned with whether functions return the values we expect. At higher levels of abstraction, we are concerned with behaviors such as error handling, performance, and the correctness of entire end-to-end features. Let's keep in mind that testability includes manual tests as well. Manual testing is a normal part of development and quality assurance. If an aspect of a software system cannot be tested manually, it is very likely that it will be quite difficult to test it using automated tools as well.

Often, developers struggle to automate manual tests for a system with low testability. This common pitfall leads to high-cost, low-value tests and a system whose architecture and organization is not improved by the testing efforts. Our focus in this book will be on improving testability using automated tests written with RSpec. We will make both manual and automated tests better, with less effort required to create and maintain our tests. Both the architecture and organization of our system will benefit. By perting some of our testing energy to improving the testability of the code, we will be engaged in a positive feedback loop, whereby our effort devoted to testing provides a meaningful benefit without excessive cost.