fuzz tests fill most of the gaps and find you problems

good real world data sets can stress test your code too, nostr:npub12262qa4uhw7u8gdwlgmntqtv7aye8vdcmvszkqwgs0zchel6mz7s6cgrkj provided me with a gigadump of 180Gb of event data and it uncovered several bugs in my json parsing code (and revealed that maybe over 1% of all events are malformed so far)

From: Egge<-DerekRoss at 05/26 10:57

> Great plug haha. Bought and almost 50% through. Loving it so far.

>

> However I am wondering about statements like “The goal of TDD is to create a test suite that you would trust with your life.”

>

> Is that really possible?

No. It's an asymptotic goal. You'll never get all the way there; but you can get to the point where you trust the test suite enough to deploy the system without fear.

>...what happens if my refactoring causes an edge case to error, that used to just slip through? Won’t it re-introduce the fear of touching the old code?

A refactoring is a small change to the code that improves structure without changing behavior. So, theoretically, a refactoring will not create such an "edge case". Realistically, however, such things _do_ occur. You have to be careful.

Still, it is possible to create a test suite that robustly resists most such "edge cases" and that you trust well enough to deploy without fear.

CC: #[4]