Error handling philosophies
In black- and white-box testing, the desired behavior is often obvious. The specification can help describe details, but you can often guess the intended behavior. That becomes much harder with error conditions. In these cases, your application will definitely fail; the only question is precisely how. The specification is now essential to describe the desired behavior as it will no longer be self-evident.
This chapter follows several principles for error handling that apply across a wide array of programming languages and environments. It will show you the importance of these principles and how to apply them to your testing:
- Fail as early as possible: Your application should raise an error as soon as it goes wrong to make debugging easier.
- Fail as little as possible: Failures should be graceful, with clear error messages to users indicating the problem. One failure shouldn’t lead to a cascade of other issues.
- Fail as specifically...
