From my series “The Next Best Thing“:
Often, you will find yourself in a debugger, trying to follow some insanely complicated code to find the root cause of a bug.
I would like to see a button in my IDE which reads “New Test Case”. It should example the current program state, determine (with my help) what part of the code I want to test and then copy the current state into a unit test. In a second step, I could then trim down the unit tests but I would have all the input, all necessary dependencies would be there, correctly initialized.
It would also be great if the IDE would track the state of the code from which the unit test was generated. If the code changes too much (indicating that the unit test might become outdated), I’d like to see that. Or maybe the IDE could figure out by itself when code tested in such a way deviates “too much.”
Along the same lines, the IDE should be able to inject probes into the product code. As I click buttons and enter data in the UI, the IDE should generate a series of unit tests under the hood as described here. If you’re using frameworks like Spring, the tests should come with minimal (or mocked) dependencies.
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