Beyond TDD

 Today I was writing a class JUnit test code that of course runs very slow as it starts up by bringing the whole AWS infrastructure online (exaggeration) just to run several assertTrue statements..

As you might suspect, I am not fond of writing this test code. This is because I know in my heart that this test code will be more burden than useful:

1. The test will contribute to a test suite that will take 5 hours to complete
2. The test is very hard to read because it deals with CSV importing code.. and Java does not deal well with such string intensive inputs
3. The test has a lot of test specific code which adds maintenance burden
4. Dev only test code, modern test code strive towards making it readable for non-technical

This frustration brought me an idea. A vision of testing Beyond TTD. What if tests live inside the application and can be used run time? The main motivation for this is to really have a living test suite and documentation. This makes it so that non-technical users can add and maintain test cases themselves with normal user-interface.

It has pros and cons of course, but it feels to me that this is the right balance. You will of course needs to really design this and probably favor pure functions to aid in test simplicity..

PS: The title is inspired by Nico Rosberg's podcast called "Beyond Victory"

TIL: The JVM can ommit stacktraces in the name of optimization

While investigating an issue, I saw a NullPointerException without a stacktrace..

ERROR logs that omits the throwable object (and it is available) is quite devastating. I call such situation 'swallowing the exception'.

However, this time, it is very different. Apparently the HotSpot JVM may opt to not log the stacktrace but  only the exception:

source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2411487/nullpointerexception-in-java-with-no-stacktrace

Having a look at older instances of this ERROR log, I found that the occurrence the day before indeed had stacktrace. This is quite surprising and something I would not expect..