Chapter 1. The promise of good tests
In this chapter
When I started getting paid for programming, the world looked a lot different. This was more than 10 years ago and people used simple text editors like Vim and Emacs instead of today’s integrated development environments like Eclipse, Net-Beans, and IDEA. I vividly remember a senior colleague wielding his Emacs macros to generate tons of calls to System.out.println as he was debugging our software. Even more vivid are my memories of deciphering the logs those printouts ended up in after a major customer had reported that their orders weren’t going through like they should.
That was a time when “testing” for most programmers meant one of two things—the stuff that somebody else does after I’m done coding, or the way you run and poke your code before you say you’re done coding. And when a bug did slip through, you’d find yourself poking and prodding your code again—this time adding a few more logging statements to see if you could figure out where things went wrong.