Thursday, March 01, 2007

How Many Unit Tests Are Enough?

Recently, I was down visiting the folks at Agitar, who make great tools for doing unit testing. Going there always results in interesting conversations because they really live and breathe unit testing and are always finding new wrinkles in how to apply the technique. During one conversation, they casually threw out a metric for unit testing that I'd never heard before. It answers the question of: How many unit tests are enough? You'll note that pretty much all the books and essays on unit testing go to great pains to avoid answering this question, for fear, I presume, that by presenting any number they will discourage developers from writing more. Likewise, if the suggested number is high, they risk discouraging developers who will see the goal as overwhelming and unreachable.

The engineers at Agitar, however, did offer a number (as a side comment to an unrelated point). They said (I'm paraphrasing) that if the amount of test code equals the amount of program code, you're generally in pretty good shape. Their experience shows that parity of the two codebases translates into code coverage of around 70%, which means a well-tested app. Needless to say, they'd probably want to qualify this statement, but as a rule of thumb, I think it's a very practical data point--even if a bit ambitious.

I will see how it works out on my open-source projects. Currently, my ratio of test-code to app-code is (cough, cough) just over 42%. I guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

3 comments:

Jeffrey Fredrick said...

42%? You're actually doing much better than most other projects...

Anonymous said...

TOJZ
and how (with which tool) did you measure 42%?

Andrew Binstock said...

TOJZ: At the time, it was purely the size in bytes measured by hand totalling the directory sizes. Today, I use an awk script (technically gawk) to count lines of code.

On this LOC basis, I am currently at 49%. Emma tells me I am getting 66% code coverage. From these figures, it would appear that given parity in codebase sizes, Agitar's projection of 70% code coverage looks low.