Testing Your Date

“Don’t unit test the library/framework code,” is a good piece of advice. And yet, it’s so often ignored.

Kaylee‘s co-worker certainly ignored it. They also ignored the basic principle of “ensure the test will work tomorrow.”

[Test]
public void TestNewDate()
{
   String date = DateTime.Now.ToShortDateString();
   Assert.IsTrue(date == "26/08/2016");
}

Now, this test has been in the code base since 2016, as you might guess. It was not disabled or otherwise commented out. “But surely, their CI job would choke on it?” you might wonder. That assumes there is a CI job, and not a batch of tests that developers run manually, 70% of which pass and the remaining 30% have tickets in their ticketing software to get fixed “eventually”.