Re: [Boost-users] [Test] How to Access Private Data from a Test

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] [Test] How to Access Private Data from a Test
From: Jürgen Hunold (jhunold_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-06-26 01:32:43

Hi Steven,

On Donnerstag, 25. Juni 2015 21:24:51 Steven Clark wrote:
> This remark really puzzles me.
> Do you feel that white-box testing should
> never be done?  Or should never be needed?

Both, in fact. See Gavin's mail for the rationale. He explained it better than 
I would have :-)

In fact, I've got a long way with black-box testing only in the past five 
years, so I have strong evidence that white-box testing is unnecessary. But 
this is on a fresh, test-driven developed code base. Designed to be black-box 
testable.

> > On Jun 25, 2015, at 4:52 PM, Jürgen Hunold <jhunold_at_gmx.eu> wrote:
> > In my opinion, a test should never access private data. 

Note the "In my opinion" :-)

> > But there are times
> > and legacy code where I had no other choice, too.

And then I wrote the disclaimer that sometimes you can't do everything with 
black-box testing. I tried hard to get a test harness up for some legacy code 
in the years before  and got stuck in multiple nested class hell, some d-
Pointer magick and class hierarchies hard to instantiate. 
That is the reason why I was able to actually grep for the friend declarations 
needed in those cases. Not nice in my opinion, but "an ugly test is better 
than no test" (see http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=203994 
for more on a pragmatic view on unit tests).

Which leads to the question if the OP was able to solve the issue or stopped 
reading after the first paragraph.

Yours,

Jürgen
-- 
* Dipl.-Math. Jürgen Hunold  ! 
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