The value of unit testing
Today I'm playing with a package called Apache Jena, which is used with RDF and Linked Data. In my head I keep pronouncing it like the battle of Jena-Auerstadt, but I suspect it's actually named for the Jena Indians and so probably should be pronounced something like "Gene-uh."
I wrote a few bits of do-nothing code as the start of a framework and decided that I might as well start early on unit testing, writing a typical early test that fails because the function it tests always returns null. To my surprise, I didn't get an assertion failure but a NoClassDefFoundError. To make those errors stop, I had to download and add two slf4j jars, two Xerces jars, and a log4j jar. Now I'm getting a plain assertion failure as I expected.
Getting all that out of the way before having a lot of code was a nice thing.
I wrote a few bits of do-nothing code as the start of a framework and decided that I might as well start early on unit testing, writing a typical early test that fails because the function it tests always returns null. To my surprise, I didn't get an assertion failure but a NoClassDefFoundError. To make those errors stop, I had to download and add two slf4j jars, two Xerces jars, and a log4j jar. Now I'm getting a plain assertion failure as I expected.
Getting all that out of the way before having a lot of code was a nice thing.