TDD Example - FizzBuzz

You've been asked to develop a fizz buzz application

• When given a number that is a multiple of 3 it should print fizz
• When given a number that is a multiple of 5 it should print buzz
• When given a number that is a multiple of 3 and 5 it should print fizzbuzz
• When given any other number it should print that number

BadSolution

If you look at the BadSolution object you will see a bad solution that meets the requirements. Can you see why it is a bad solution? This is a simple example, but in general you can ensure a better and more testable design by

Now let's try some TDD to come up with a better solution...

Step 1: Define a signature for our method

First we should come up with a signature for our method Solution.fizzbuzz. For the implementation use ??? for now.

Step 2: Write our test cases

Next write some tests in SolutionTest to test the Solution.fizzbuzz method - you have 2 possible approaches with TDD.

1. Write all tests before you start on implementation to cover every edge case (my preferred approach)
2. Write a test, do the least amount you need to get it to pass, then write the next test

Once you have your tests check that they are failing. You can do this in IntelliJ, but can also get sbt to automatically re-run your tests when the code changes:

sbt
~testOnly *SolutionTest

Step 3: Implement solution

Now implement the solution in Solution.fizzbuzz and get all of your tests to pass!

Now let's try some property based testing...

Property driven testing is about testing a property of something that should always hold. For example consider testing the tail method on a List. The following should always hold, for any list with at least 1 element:

myList.length shouldBe myList.tail.length + 1

Property based testing allows us to make sure some condition like this holds regardless of the input. In reality it does this by running test cases many times with randomly generated data (which you can enforce constraints on).

What properties do you think should always hold for our fizzbuzz method? Could you write some property driven tests to check these properties always hold?

Check out the documentation for ScalaTest with ScalaCheck here:
http://www.scalatest.org/user_guide/generator_driven_property_checks