Overly Complex Tests

Definition:

• Unit tests, like production code, should be easily understandable. In general, a programmer must understand the intent of an individual test as fast as possible. If a test is so complicated that you can’t immediately tell if it is correct or not, it makes it very difficult to determine if the cause of a test failure is bad production code or bad test code. Even worse, this allows the possibly of code that incorrectly passes a test.

References:

Quality attributes

• - Code Example

• - Cause and Effect

• - Frequency

• - Refactoring

• JUnit Anti-patterns