Advanced Testing and Refactoring Techniques

When you inherit difficult code it can take weeks to become productive. Having the right tools for the job and knowing how to use them makes a huge difference. In this post I explain how.

Approval Testing, Coverage and Mutation Testing

Sometimes you don’t know what a piece of code is supposed to do, but you do know that people are using it in production, and that it in some sense ‘works’. One approach I often use in this situation is Approval testing. It can get you test coverage quickly without having to understand the code.

Since you don’t know what the code is supposed to do, you can’t define in advance what results you expect. But, what you can do is run the code, accept whatever it does as ‘correct’, then invent scenarios that will exercise all the code branches. I’ve made a video of me doing just this on some rather hairy legacy code - The Gilded Rose Refactoring Kata. With the right tools the tests fall into place relatively easily.

I’d like to credit Llewellyn Falco who showed me this way to solve this exercise.

I recorded a screencast in several parts. Subsequent posts will link to the other parts.

Part 1: Introducing the Gilded Rose kata and writing test cases using Approval Tests

About the Gilded Rose code

One of the exercises I’ve used for years to help programmers improve their skills is the Gilded Rose Kata. It’s a refactoring kata - the code needs cleaning up and tests adding so you can build a new feature. That is a realistic scenario that programmers often face in everyday work, but this exercise adds a fantasy twist. The code you have to work with keeps track of various magical items stocked at the Gilded Rose establishment. The new feature concerns support for “Conjured” items that have slightly different magical properties from the other items. The scenario is just weird enough to be fun and just realistic enough to be a useful exercise.

I didn’t design the kata originally, that was Terry Hughes. I spruced up the code a little to make it a better exercise and added some extra instructions to get you going. I also translated the starting code into a few different programming languages and put it up on GitHub. In the 5 years since then I have been delighted to see how popular it’s become. I’ve had over 50 contributors chip in with various translations and improvements, and at least 800 people have forked the project and presumably had a go at the refactoring.

I think the appeal of the exercise is partly the wacky scenario it throws you into, and partly how utterly terrible the code is at the start. If you do the refactoring well it actually looks really neat at the end, which is very satisfying.

This is a trilogy. Find the next blog and video here