What if writing tests was a joyful experience?

> But think: everything in those describe blocks had to be written by hand. It also had to be thought about by the developer. Someone had to say "I want the code to do this under these conditions". If your tests can be autogenerated then they aren't verifying expected behaviour, they're just locking in your implementation such that it can't change later. They are saying "hey look everyone, I got my coverage metric to 100% (despite any bugs I may…

I realize that the example is contrived, but what is the point of writing a test of a fibonacci function if your test harness is designed to just take whatever it tells you and updates the assert to verify that what it told you is indeed what it just told you. This assumes the code you wrote is already correct and giving the correct answer, so why bother writing tests? If, however you accept that you may have got it…

Most of the non-joyful experience of writing tests lies in the context preparation, not so much in the expected outputs. I think we need a modern version of design by contract instead. Its one of the most powerful techniques of testing software is unfortunately often ignored and overlooked these days... Some less known things about design by contract: - you can easily test way more than types in preconditions and postconditions - extreme web controller postcondition example: every time there…