Testing Challenges in Collaborative Software Development

In this lesson, we will understand the challenges that arise as we grow our software into a larger codebase. We will review what is meant by a collaborating object, then we will take a look at two examples of collaborations that are challenging to test.

Challenges with collaborating objects

As we grow our software system, we will soon outgrow what can go in a single class (or function, for that matter). We will split our code into multiple parts. If we pick a single object as our subject under test, any other object that it depends on is a collaborator. Our TDD tests must account for the presence of these collaborators. Sometimes, this is straightforward, as we’ve seen in earlier sections. Unfortunately, things aren’t always that simple. Some collaborations make tests difficult – or impossible– to write. These kinds of collaborators introduce either unrepeatable behaviors that we must contend with or present errors that are difficult to trigger.