Re: pgAdmin 4 commit: Ensure we pick up the messages from the current query

Hello Khushboo,

The patch runs successfully in our CI with all tests passing.

I see the test that you created, and I do not understand why we need to create tests that do HTTP requests in order to check something that is executed against the database. What I was talking about in my previous email was having tests that tested the function by itself.

 

(Copied from: https://jfiaffe.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/tests-pyramid.png)

This is the Testing Pyramid, there are a bunch of different drawings of it and ways to explain it, but in broad stokes what is means is that we should have the majority of tests around a Unit (that are some disagreements in the community of what a Unit is) and a very small amount of Manual testing. What Unit usually means is piece of code, it can be a function, it can be a class or it can even be a module, but is something self contained. In pgAdmin's case the majority of our tests go around the Integration Layer because we are using HTTP requests in order to executing queries in the database, so basically we are doing tests end to end in the backend, and the cost time.

I do not want to held this patch back because of this, and I say this because I have minimal confidence with the tests that you created, that they would catch the majority of the problems, and hope that the majority of the code is exercised by it.

Nevertheless I would like to challenge all the Hackers to think about testing in a different way. The tests in our code are used to give us confidence that the work we did is working as expected, this also makes it much easier to refactor out bad patterns or very complicated ones into something simple. A signal that our code is more complicated then it should is when we need to test some behavior and we end up with a Stubbing Hell or we need to test it End 2 End because it is to hard to isolate the part we want to test. In the other hand we should not test all functions and every class, because we might be coupling our tests to much to the implementation and that will have the contrary effect, and we will not be able to refactor and simply our code.

Like everything in life there need to be a balance.