The Testability Explorer cometh....

So last time, we explored on how to find hotspots and untested code in your code base. But then you start looking at your code, and then you realize there is a reason why you didn't test the darn thing. The code's untestable. Whoo hoo..

Well, there is no such thing as untestable code. Or rather, all untestable code can be refactored to make it much nicer and easier to test, through a variety of techniques. The first and foremost reason for untestable code ends up being "Constructor doing work." If the constructor of a class does anything more than stuff like "this.x = x" or if it tries to call a constructor itself or use a *GASP* static factory, bingo, you have a problem.

But fixing that isn't the target of this post. That will be covered in a later one, cause its a doozie. No, in this post, I want to talk about how to find these untestable code snippets without any manual effort. Every code base has atleast a few of these gems, which turn up being a nightmare to test, and in turn make everything depending on it a nightmare as well. Well, fear not, for the Testability Explorer cometh...

The Testability Explorer (http://www.testabilityexplorer.org) is an open source tool which looks at classes and does cyclomatic complexity analysis on it. What does that mean ? Well, it looks for things which make testing hard, like conditionals, and recursively dives in to objects it instantiates to find their testability score. In that respect, it is a static and recursive analysis of a code base. It takes all these into consideration and assigns a score to each class. Based on these scores, a class is either

• An excellent to test class
• A Good class but could use some work
• A horrible class to test, needs a lot of work.

The following image, taken from the Testability Explorer website, shows a sample report generated by the tool :

As you can see, it generates html reports with bar graphs and pie charts. It can even, depending on the options you specify, allow you to dig in deep into the problem classes and find the method and line which causes you the most problem to test. This can give you great insight on deciding what classes need refactoring first to make it testable. A lot of times, fixing the most problematic one causes a ripple effect, which fixes a bunch of problems in classes depending on it.

Another great thing is that the Testability Explorer can take jar files, so if you don't want to expose your code directly to it, you have an option. Though sadly, the Testability Explorer is currently only available for Java code. It stands to reason that something similar could be done for C++, though you Javascript guys are out on your own.

All in all, a great tool. But don't depend solely on it. It is great as one tool in a repertoire of tools, but not just by itself. Testability Explorer is also a great way to notice trends, of whether your code is growing more testable or untestable, and other great things, just like code coverage. Though leading you to nothing more than testable code, you would be surprised at how much positive impact increased testability and tests can have on the quality of a project.

So go check it out. And enjoy.