Test Code Should Be of Great Quality

I m sick of hearing comments like, Oh, but it s only test code. Bad test code is just about as bad as no test code.

One bug I am overly familiar with resulted from a test case failing silently when a security violation was found. The application would fail during a test pass, but the code failed to catch the exception raised by the application, so it continued testing the application as though no security condition existed.

When writing test code, you should try to make it of ship quality, the sort of stuff you would be happy to give to a client. And let s be honest: sometimes test code ends up being used by people other than the test organization, including third-party developers who build add-on functionality to the application, the sustained engineering teams, and people who might update the current version of the application once the developers move on to the next version.