Comment by Luís Soares on "12 Tips for Writing Better Automated Tests" | Hashnode

Luís Soares

software developer

Feb 9, 2021

Nice article! My 2 cent: Usually, I don't agree with "Avoid magic numbers or strings". I wrote an article about it. I prefer DAMP and Evident Data (Kent Beck).

I'd do instead:

const userPosts = callToGetUserPosts();
expect(userPosts).toBe(1);

which is a self-documenting single-liner.

Dino Kacavenda

Full Stack Developer

Feb 9, 2021

Thank you for reading the article :). I agree with things you wrote in your article, what I meant by avoiding magic values is to approve the readability of tests when you have some complex setups (for example you setup a database to test your repository layer). In those cases, I have found it is very hard to determine what some value means. If values are self-evident like in your example then I completely agree that you can inline the value.

Dino Kacavenda thanks for reading my article. my point is that there rarely is the need of creating constants. And when there is, perhaps there's a smell around it. maybe you can find a better example 🤓

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