Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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183.2

184.6

Wed, 05 Oct 2005

Tweak to CalculateFixture

I've become fond of FitLibrary's CalculateFixture. The second table below is an example:

The columns to the left of the blank column are input values. Those to the right are expected results. The blank column is a nice visual separator.

Each line of a table should be easy to understand. Sometimes that means annotation. I've hacked my copy of CalculateFixture to allow notes after yet another blank column. Like this:

That's easily done in the 9Feb2005 version. In bind:

for (int i = 0; heads != null; i++, heads = heads.more) {
    String name = heads.text();
    try {
	if (name.equals("")) {
+           if (pastDoubleColumn) break;
//          if (argCount > -1)
//              throw new FitFailureException("Two empty columns");
            argCount = i;
            targets = new MethodTarget[rowLength-i-1];
      

And remove an error check in doRow:

if (row.parts.size() != argCount+methods+1) {
    exception(row.parts,"Row should be "+(argCount+methods+1)+" cells wide");
    return;
}
      

I'd like to see this change become part of FitLibrary. It cannot break existing tables (because of the error check). The error check would no longer catch mistakes in the table, but I can't see such a mistake lasting past the first time someone tried to make the test pass. It would be easy enough to change the error check to take blank columns into account, but I doubt I'd bother.

## Posted at 15:31 in category /fit [permalink] [top]