On Friday, 23 March 2018 at 20:43:15 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I've worked on a project where the testing was separated from the code, and it was a liability IMO. Things would get missed and not tested properly.
That's where Test Driven Development comes in.
Yep. As I mentioned elsewhere, recently I've had to resort to external testing for one of my projects, and I'm still working on that right now. And already, I'm seeing a liability: rather than quickly locating a unittest immediately following a particular function, now I have to remember "oh which subdirectory was it that the tests were put in? and which file was it that a particular test of this function was done?". It's an additional mental burden to have to keep doing the mapping between current source location <-> test code location (even if it's a 1-to-1 mapping), and a physical burden to have to continually open external files (and typing a potentially long path for them) rather than just "bookmark, jump to end of function, navigate unittest blocks" in the same file.
There are pluses and minuses to both approaches, but I don't think that a separate file approach is as difficult as you are suggesting. The naming is typically identical to the project entities being tested, with a prefix like "Test_" tacked onto the front of the project, modules, classes and functions, making finding things straightforward. And most modern editors/IDEs will allow multiple files and projects to be open at the same time, allowing test code to be opened only once per coding session.
