Confusion regarding unit testing of private methods
from the CommonsWare Community archivesAt February 11, 2020, 4:04am, sagarsuri56 asked:
I have started writing unit testing for most of my android framework independent classes e.g: Repository, Usecase, etc. I want to know whether it is a good idea to use @VisibleForTesting to test private methods in a class?
@mmurphy
At February 11, 2020, 12:04pm, mmurphy replied:
Personally, I tend to use @VisibleForTesting only for cases where I cannot test the public API without it. I focus on black box testing, exercising the public API and confirming that it works.
That’s not to say that white-box testing (testing private APIs) is wrong. It just is not the approach that I personally use.
Even if your project has an objective of 100% code coverage, in principle all private APIs should be triggered by some use of public APIs — otherwise, that private API is unused and could be removed. However, it may be less painful to use @VisibleForTesting and write a more direct test than it would be to come up with tests that exercise the private API purely via the public API.
At March 10, 2020, 3:09am, sagarsuri56 replied:
Yeah even I am using @VisibleForTesting most of the time. But some of my peers pointed out that it’s a code smell which I don’t agree. So wanted to get your suggestion on this part.