Pereira's blog

I was watching a video about BDD and decided to try the technique with an exercise. What is happening is that I’m starting to question the Camel Case convention. After a couple of lines of code I have something like:

public void shouldHaveFirstTransitivePropertyOfInequality() {
		assertTrue(valueUnderTest.compareTo(valueExpectedToBeBiggerThanExpected) < 0);
		assertTrue(valueExpectedToBeBiggerThanExpected.compareTo(anotherValueExpectedToBeEvenBiggerThanExpected) < 0);
		assertTrue(valueUnderTest.compareTo(anotherValueExpectedToBeEvenBiggerThanExpected) < 0);
	}

Full sentences in the method names. Yeah, it specifies the expected behaviour of the unit under test, but the question is about readability now.

I tried to remove the camel case to see if the readability improves, and also because I’m not a Lazzy Programmer

public void should_have_first_transitive_property_of_inequality() {
	assertTrue(value_under_test.compareTo(value_expected_to_be_bigger) < 0);
	assertTrue(value_expected_to_be_bigger.compareTo(value_expected_to_be_even_bigger) < 0);
	assertTrue(value_under_test.compareTo(value_expected_to_be_even_bigger) < 0);
}

I’m feeling good with the readability improvement, so I will drop Camel Case in my BDD exercises.

One concern I had, when started this BDD exercise, was about the length of the name for objects, fields and methods. Yes, it may look a little odd at first (ohh, the guilty of breaking conventions!!), but like everything else in life, also this code may turn to be better than what I have today. My goal is to improve readability and not follow a convention.

The video is from Dave Astels (http://techblog.daveastels.com/) and is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOkHh8zF33o

jpereira java, programming BDD, Code Conventions, java, Programming, TDD