Building a Safety Net for Continuous Delivery with Developer Tests

It is impossible to develop a software system with a certain level of complexity unless it is built on top of a smaller working system.

I wanted to credit Bjarne Stroustup for expressing this point of view as early as 1985 in his book The C++ Programming Language, but after re-reading his Notes to the Reader, I see that the quote I remembered was on the importance of well-structured code (in which C++ excels over C), not correctness.

Still, I don’t think I am alone when I claim that we software developers find it natural to develop iteratively, thereby continuously building on top of the last iteration, the last working system.

The question is, how do we know that the system we build on is working?

The truth is that unless we have a very good verification process we don’t know if we build on a working system.

In a good continuous delivery process, we will have waves of verification in the form of continuous integration builds and deployments, automatic and manual testing by testers etc.

Naturally, developers will also develop unit tests as an integrated part of developing code, thereby ensuring that each implemented responsibility behaves as expected in isolation.

But is this good enough? Will it ensure that each iteration builds on a working system?

I think it is not good enough because,

• Testing is usually decoupled in time and space from the development process.
• Unit testing only verifies tiny pieces of logic in isolation, but bugs typically show up when these pieces of logic are composed into higher level behaviour.

If you ask me, developers needs to write what I call developer tests.

Developer Tests

A developer test is similar to a unit test, the difference being that we never mock any dependencies unless we absolutely must. For example, we mock external web services that our code calls, but we do not mock database access.

When we run a developer test, we run the exact same code as is run in the production system, which means that the behaviour of the test will closely match the behaviour of the production system. This means that the verification which is done by a developer test is very reliable.

When I develop new code, I always exercise the new behaviour through developer tests. This is typically much easier than setting up the production system with the relevant users with relevant permissions and relevant data to query and alter.

When my new developer tests turn green, I feel confident that my new behaviour works as intended, not only in isolation but also when run in context with huge parts of the existing functionality.

When I have verified that the existing developer tests are green I feel confident that I did not introduce regressions.

Then I check the code changes into the main branch and the new feature will be in the next release a short while after.

What Makes Developer Tests Work

I have developed the concept of developer tests over the last couple of years while working on TradingFloor.com. Since it is now second nature to use developer tests as an integral part of the software development process, it is difficult to remember why this seemed difficult, or impossible, to do just a couple of years ago.

A major part of the reason that developer tests work in TradingFloor.com is that the code is (largely) written with sensible principles in mind, and in this context one of the SOLID principles, the Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP), is essential. And furthermore, using Dependency Injection is practical.

This means that when I exercise my new behaviour through the method Foo on class Bar …

public class Bar
{
    Bar(IMyDependency1 dep1, IMyDependency2 dep2) { /*…*/}
    void Foo() { /*… use dep1 and dep2 */ }
}

… then I also run the code of the two dependencies (and their dependencies, and their dependencies …), including any kind of logging, interception and whatnot. This is in contrast to a unit test in which I would mock the two dependencies.

In addition to DIP, our experience is that the Command Query Separation (CQS) principle is a great help in general in our code structure, and in particular this principle makes writing developer tests easy. I suppose you can imagine that a code base composed of queries (we call them readers) and command handlers are very handy when building up a test scenario and when asserting the outcome of a test.

Why is the Entire World not Using Developer Tests

Developer tests allow for faster development, they provide fast feedback on correctness during development and they provide a safety net for the future.

Yet, I have not seen a rush for all other developers to get on board and start to use developer tests. Why?

Here are some of the counter arguments I have heard so far,

• It cannot be done.
  That argument is a couple of years old. Today we are doing it on a daily basis.
• It is too slow.
  No, our 850+ tests run in one minute on a typical developer PC.
• Developer tests are very brittle.
  No, it is the other way around. Unit tests are often very brittle because you need to re-do your mocking when refactoring code. Developer tests don’t have this problem and they are surprisingly solid towards refactoring.
• I cannot do it because my code is much more complex than your code.
  If your code is really complex, working without a safety net is not an option! You can do it.
• I run a heavy SQL database, tests will be too slow and difficult to set up.
  Right, we run a no-SQL database so building up an entire database per test is fast and easy. Installing the database locally and on any build or test system is also easy and fast. All that will be a hassle with some SQL databases, but not impossible. If you have to, you can isolate SQL access and mock it out but I would prefer not to.

Where Are We Now

I would love to share more details but I feel that I need to introduce developer tests to at least one more project before I can express myself without going into too much detail.

I will come back with more information once I have done that. In the meantime, if you would like me to elaborate on this or that, please ask.