Recently, I switched jobs from karriere.at, Austria's largest job platform, to the Austrian Federal Computing Centre, where my colleagues and I work on modernizing Austria's digital tax services. One of the first things I noticed, looking at the new codebase, was that we heavily use German terms for naming certain classes, functions, and variables. At first, this seemed to me like a giant red flag. But now, after seeing the problem through a different lens, I realize that in many instances, it can make a lot of sense to use our native tongue to name certain things...
To become a capable programmer, it is crucial to have systems that free you of the mental burden of thinking about all the little things while programming so you can focus on the big picture...
A few weeks ago, I wrote about naming unit tests BDD style using Given/When/Then. In this article, I have expressed the thought that I do not like to repeat information in the description and in the expect statement. After writing some tests the way I've described in this article, I noticed a couple of drawbacks...
When multiple people are working together on a project, it is important to define some rules to make sure that everything stays tidy and chaos does not arise. How to name things is one of the areas in which there are always differences in opinion...
For the most time, when writing unit tests, I favored the it should ... pattern for naming my tests. But time and time again, I noticed that when following this naming convention, I either had to write very long test cases or omit important information...