Normally the software projects I worked in never consisted of a proper unit testing phase. What we did all these years was not UT but IT ( integration testing ). Some people still oppose when I say you can’t unit test a code without completely isolating the method under test. This is probably due to their lack of knowledge or something related to the rocket science that I still don’t know. In either case, I love to direct them to this one book called “The art of Unit Testing by Roy Oshervoe”. In one project, I got an opportunity to study about unit testing and submit a report on whether it is feasible under the current workflow.The knowledge gained from that particular assignment, I consider precious.
What I’m going to talk about is not about unit testing in general. I suggest you to take a look at that book I mentioned to get a good picture of current unit testing methods etc; Ignore if you already know. During my assignment, while trying out different techniques like dependency injection in my project scenario, I come across a difficult situation. I was testing a C++/CLI wrapper for a module in C++. Its basically an adapter that marshals the native C++ types in to corresponding C# types and vice versa. Wrappers normally have little or less logic. But, there are some ‘if’s and ‘while’s involved even though that counts as the conversion logic only. To ensure nearly a complete code coverage, I need to test those minute details too. Dependency to the module that is being wrapped is obvious. I need to get rid of it in order to test it.
A typical C++/CLI Wrapper
A normal dependency breaking scenario consists of two classes that are coupled together that we use inversion of control(IoC) to loosen the coupling. IoC is a process by which the assembler binds the object coupling at run-time. Normally we achieve this through Dependency Injection, where the interface or base class of the dependent class is injected via the constructor or setter functions. [Contd. See next page]
