as far as I understand it, most people seem to agree that private methods should not be tested directly, but rather through whatever public methods call them. I can see their point, but I have some problems with this when I try to follow the “Three Laws of TDD”, and use the “Red – green – refactor” cycle. I think it’s best explained by an example:
Right now, I need a program that can read a file (containing tab-separated data) and filter out all columns that contain non-numerical data. I guess there’s probably some simple tools available already to do this, but I decided to implement it from scratch myself, mostly because I figured it could be a nice and clean project for me to get some practice with TDD.
So, first, I “put the red hat on”, that is, I need a test that fails. I figured, I’ll need a method that finds all the non-numerical fields in a line. So I write a simple test, of course it fails to compile immediately, so I start writing the function itself, and after a couple of cycles back and forth (red/green) I have a working function and a complete test.
Next, I continue with a function, “gatherNonNumericColumns” that reads the file, one line at a time, and calls my “findNonNumericFields”-function on each line to gather up all the columns that eventually must be removed. A couple of red-green-cycles, and I’m done, having again, a working function and a complete test.
Now, I figure I should refactor. Since my method “findNonNumericFields” was designed only because I figured I would need it when implementing “gatherNonNumericColumns”, it seems to me that it would be reasonable to let “findNonNumericFields” become private. However, that would break my first tests, since they would no longer have access to the method they were testing.
So, I end up with a private methods, and a suite of test that test it. Since so many people advice that private methods should not be tested, it feels like I’ve painted myself into a corner here. But where exactly did I fail?
I gather I could have started out at a higher level, writing a test that tests what will eventually become my public method (that is, findAndFilterOutAllNonNumericalColumns), but that feels somewhat counter to the whole point of TDD (at least according to Uncle Bob): That you should switch constantly between writing tests and production code, and that at any point in time, all your tests worked within the last minute or so. Because if I start out by writing a test for a public method, there will be several minutes (or hours, or even days in very complex cases) before I get all the details in the private methods to work so that the test testing the public method passes.
So, what to do? Is TDD (with the rapid red-green-refactor cycle) simply not compatible with private methods? Or is there a fault in my design?