Writing tests cases

Writing tests cases

Posted Oct 11, 2012 11:57 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Linux and automotive computing security by quotemstr
Parent article: Linux and automotive computing security

Would it be safe to say that for these systems, the majority of the actual effort is expended on writing testcases?

I hope that, in this day and age, the effort on writing and running test cases for any non-trivial system is the majority of the coding effort! In a recent interview Kernighan says that in his classes:

I also ask them to write tests to check their code, and a test harness so the testing can be done mechanically. These are useful skills that are pretty much independent of specific languages or environments.

Given that tests should be about half the size of the system (for a big system), and that they are run repeatedly, they should take the majority of the coding effort. For critical systems this amount should be probably higher.

I am just speaking about coding, but obviously it is not the only development activity. I am not surprised to learn from the above poster that analysis and design take even longer than coding.

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