Hello 1nickt,

I tried to produce as short a summary as I could. The following concerns may be the case with a real b.u.m. (bloated_untestable_method), though:

• b.u.m. has many dependencies - need to construct a lot of objects to make a meaningful call;
• b.u.m. has side effects - which means mocks must be built to account for them;
• b.u.m. interacts with the outside world, like querying a web-service - need to build a mock for that
• b.u.m. only misbehaves sporadically, producing normal output most of the time. And we don't know the exact conditions under which it happens.

Of course these are all bad signs. B.u.m. needs to be split into smaller functions with narrower responsibilities. But that in turn requires getting at least some test coverage on it. And covering it with tests would require prohibitively much time.

My idea is that runtime assertions can serve as a safety net when fiddling with b.u.m - at least they can provide some warning before angry customers arrive at the office. Also they may catch an unintended effect of changing one of b.u.m's dependencies (aka spooky action at a distance).

This is all unneeded in case of proper design but properly designed modules are somehow more common on CPAN than in production (at least in my experience).

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.