Guru's Guide to SQL Server™ Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML, The

Testing in the Extreme

There's a school of thought that says that software functionality that can't be checked via automated tests doesn't exist.^[8] I'm afraid I have to disagree with this. There are functional aspects of software design that are difficult if not impossible to test, especially with automated tests. One, in particular, is the aspect of extensibility. How do you check extensibility with an automated test? You really can't, and yet you have to design and code for extensibility just as you would any other feature. Another is maintainability. Surely we coders want to write maintainable code, and surely we'd consider code that was too tangled to maintain to be buggy from a design standpoint, yet we might not know this until after the ...