Comments on: Unit testing in C++

By: Jamal Warsi

Jamal Warsi — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:54:38 +0000

The amount of code written for the unit testing is generally lenghty.
But,it again depends how intelligent your code is.

By: Daniel Rákos

Daniel Rákos — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:24:22 +0000

I was thinking about the amount of code needed to be added for unit testing, not talking about the generated code. Of course you don’t want to link the test objects with the production objects but usually separate file is used for tests instead of conditional compilation. However, both work in practice.

Anyway, my point is that companies worry about that their software engineers have to write double amount of code and that takes time and money.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 02:07:35 +0000

“Others have concerns about that unit testing doubles the code as so increases maintenance because the testing code is as big as the implementation itself. By the way, in a real life example the testing code can even be double the size of the production code. However, the added benefit of a well tested product eliminates most of the cost of bug fixes as they are discovered in the very beginning of the development process.”

In C++ this can be easily ruled out by placing the test in #ifdef BUILD_DEBUG or #ifdef BUILD_UNITTEST, so this is almost a non-issue.