In the previous post Case Study: 2 Simple Principles to achieve High Code Maintainability I explained that the principles layered code + high coverage ratio by test are 2 simple principles that can be objectively applied, validated and measured. When these 2 principles are applied they lead to High Code Maintainability: As a consequence the management saves money in the long term and developers are happy to work in a cleaner code base with principles easy to follow.
Large and complex UI 90%+ covered by tests
In this previous post I used the example of the new NDepend v2020.1 graph. This new tool is a large and complex UI with dozens of actions proposed to the user and drastic performance requirement (it scales live on 100.000+ elements). This graph implementation is 90% covered by tests. It is not because there is a lot of UI code that it should not been well tested. We didn’t spend a good part of our resources in writing tests just for the sake of it. We did it because we know by experience that it’ll pay off: probably a few bugs will be reported as for all 1.0 implementation although beta test phases already caught some. But we are confident that it won’t take a lot of resources to fix them. We can look forward the future confidently (like supporting properly .NET 5 that will be released in November 2020). And indeed 10 days after its 1.0 release no bug has been reported (nor logged) on this new graph although many users downloaded it: so far it looks rock-solid and we can focus on what’s next.
The picture below shows all namespace, classes and methods of the graph implementation. Smaller rectangles are methods and the color of each rectangle indicates how well a method is covered by tests. Clearly we tolerate some gaps in UI code, while non UI code like Undo/Redo actions implementations are 100% covered. Experience told us how to balance our resources and that everything does not have to be perfect to achieve high maintainability.
