Coding Is Like Cooking

A blog by Emily Bache

Coding Is Like Cooking

A blog by Emily Bache

Coding Is Like Cooking

A blog by Emily Bache

Writing Good Tests for the Gilded Rose Kata

by | Mar 19, 2013 | Coding Skills, Conference information | 3 comments

I’ve been working on this Kata “Gilded Rose” at a few different coding dojos lately. There is even a video of a session I did at the “Tampere Goes Agile” conference recently. In the video, you can see me talking about my Principles of Agile Test Automation, which I have just written about, and updated in my last blog post.

I think these test automation principles are useful to think about when you’re doing the Gilded Rose kata. The basic plot of the Kata is that you’ve just been hired to look after an existing system, and the customer wants a new feature. Having a look at the code, you can see you’re going to want to refactor it a little before adding the new feature, and before you do that, you’re going to want some automated tests.

So the first part of the Kata is to add automated tests to the existing code. You’ve got a requirements document the customer has given you, and you can use it to identify test cases. You’ve also got the code which you can read and execute and work out what it does. The customer is happily using the code in production right now, so you can assume that the behaviour it has is the behaviour they want to keep, whatever it says in the requirements document. (hint!)

Warning – spoilers lie ahead! You should probably try the Gilded Rose kata for yourself before reading on!

When I’ve done this exercise with various groups, I’ve spent a lot of time discussing with people how to make their test cases really readable, and express the requirements clearly, and at the same time useful as regression protection when refactoring the code later.

When you design a test suite you have two main aims – to help you understand what the code should do, (and what it does now), and protection from regression failures when you update it. It can be a bit tricky to do both with the same test suite. If you focus solely on describing the requirements in an executable way, you tend to miss edge cases and there are gaps in the regression protection. If you focus only on regression protection, you’ll spend time analysing the edge cases, and measuring code coverage to see how well you’re doing, but the test cases can become quite hard to read and understand.

You can see for yourself by comparing this test case by Bobby Johnson with this text-based approval test. (It was written by several people at a GothPy meeting). Bobby’s test case is extremely readable and expresses the requirements clearly. He’s done pretty well on the edge cases, but I think he’s missing one or two*. With the text-based approval tests, it’s not so easy to understand what the underlying business rules are, although the regression protection is very good.

When I do this kata with a group, we spend some time discussing the various test cases we’ve come up with, and showing them on the projector. When we did this last week at the Booster Conference, people commented that showing these different test cases had given them a better understanding of “readability” and “regression protection”, and many went on to improve their test suites.

Once you’re reasonably happy with your test suite, the next task is to do the refactoring and add the new feature. How useful are your test cases for regression protection? It’s very easy to make refactoring mistakes in this kata, and you will be testing your tests! You may discover while refactoring that there are more test cases that you want to add. Version control can be pretty useful, so you can run the new test cases against the original code.

There’s also an interesting restriction on your refactoring options – the “Item” class is owned by a nasty-sounding goblin and he doesn’t want you to change his code, so if you do, you have to be prepared for some serious consequences! When comparing refactored solutions at the end of the dojo, this is often an interesting discussion point – did you change the Item class? Is your new design so great that you’re prepared to argue with the goblin for it?!

I havn’t tried this, but I would actually like to try running the text-based approval test against all the refactored solutions at the end of the coding dojo, as input to the retrospective. I think this test covers all the edge cases very well, and would reveal any refactoring mistakes that were not caught by the tests people had developed themselves. That would be interesting feedback to have!

If you havn’t tried the Gilded Rose kata yourself, I do recommend it for practicing writing good test cases. I’d be happy to get a pull request from you if you want to translate the exercise into your favourite programming language, or you can do it in the original C#, as Bobby suggests.

If you’re interested in taking part in a coding dojo with me, I’ll be at several conferences later this year: ACCU in Bristol, XP2013 in Vienna and Test Automation Day in the Netherlands.

* I believe he’s missing a check that the quality of backstage passes doesn’t increase past 50

Hi – I´m Emily!

I am an independent consultant with Bache Consulting and chair of the Samman Technical Coaching Society.  As a technical coach I work with software development organizations who want to get better at the technical practices needed to be agile, including Test-Driven Development, Refactoring and Incremental Design. I live in Gothenburg, Sweden, although I am originally from the UK. I’ve written two books: “Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman method” and  “The Coding Dojo Handbook”. I teach for both O’Reilly and  Pluralsight. I’m married to Geoff Bache, creator of TextTest. I am also on Mastodon as emilybache@sw-development-is.social.

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If you’d like to know a bit more about me, my work, and the talks and workshops I offer, please visit my main website: EmilyBache.com. There, you’ll find information about my background, upcoming events, and the services I provide as a technical coach and consultant. It’s a good place to start if you’re curious about how I can support your team in improving coding skills and agile practices.

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