Some thoughts on testing while I’m waiting for my commit email from CruiseControl…

Inversion of Control: Pass stuff as parameters, don’t instantiate objects inside methods just to make queries on them. It makes it much easier to use mock objects or stubs if the things you need are passed as parameters. If I had to come up with a pithy catchphrase for this it would be something like: “Methods should only create objects that will be returned from the method.”

This leads me neatly onto my other thought for the day – “Tell don’t ask”. Code should look like a sequence of commands, not a bunch of questions. If all you are doing is querying an object about its state, shouldn’t that code be inside the object? I think the anti-pattern is called something like Feature Envy, or Data Envy or something. Code that follows the ‘tell don’t ask’ principle is generally more polymorphic, more modular and easier to refactor.