More on one test class per class

I knew there was some other place this recommendation had recently popped up: "Emergent Design" by Scott Bain, via Ralph Johnson.

Unit test the class

Travis Griggs comes to the conclusion that unit test objects should map 1:1 to classes under test.

I agree.

In fact, I would go a bit further: tests should be an integral part of a class. While this helps avoid negative outcomes such as parallel class hierarchies or having code and tests diverge, it more importantly simplifies the test/code relationship and drives home the point that code is incomplete without its tests.

While I was working with JUnit on a reasonably large Java system, both finding a good place for a particular test and finding the tests for a specific class became quite burdensome after a while.

For this reason MPWTest simply asks classes to test themselves. Furthermore, only frameworks are tested, so the test tool simply loads each framework to test, enumerates the classes within that particular framework and then runs the tests it finds. TestCases and TestSuites are implicitly created from this structure, removing most of the administrative burdens of unit testing, and also any explicit dependence of the tests on the testing framework.

Having no dependencies on the testing framework makes it easier to ship tests in production code without having to also ship the testing framework. While this may sound odd at first, it avoids potential issues with code compiled for testing being different than code destined to be shipped, and further reinforces the idea that tests are an integral part of each class, rather than an optional add-on.