Comments on: guilty of untestability

By: I wish there was a mocking framework… « monkey island

I wish there was a mocking framework… « monkey island — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:15:49 +0000

[...] something is hard to test it gives excellent feedback about the quality of the code under test. If you’re a developer [...]

By: szczepiq

szczepiq — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:58:46 +0000

Fair points.

Sometimes a rule contradicts some other rule. Sometimes one is more more important than other.
It’s all about applying the right rule to the problem at hand.

By: Hamlet D'Arcy

Hamlet D'Arcy — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:45:49 +0000

My code base is infected with the “Class calls static methods” problem. Fine. I’ll refactor those static methods onto a separate class that can be instantiated. But now I’ve violated your consistency vs. elegance rule described here: http://monkeyisland.pl/2007/12/29/consistency-over-elegance/
I’m left with code that is elegant (“testable”) in some spots but no longer consistent.

And, by the way, my codebase is way to large to consistently apply a new non-static pattern across all the objects.

This dilemma is why I value “inconsistently well” over “consistently wrong”. I don’t see another way out of my situation. Perhaps I could carve out sub-projects and make those internally consistent, but again I don’t really have the authority.

I blogged my thoughts here a few months ago:
http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com/2007/12/value-of-consistency.html