Welcome to the sixth installment of Learning Through Example – Mars Rover! In this post, we’ll pick up from where we left off with Rover and start implementing the rules for the Rover to move backward!
Just like last time, we’ll first examine what it means for the Rover to move backward by looking over the requirements in deeper detail. Once we have a better understanding, we’ll start driving out the functionality by focusing on a simple case and building more complexity. By the end of this post, we’ll have a Rover that will know how to move backward when facing any Direction!
If we look back at the original requirements for moving backward, we find this single line with regards to moving backward
When the rover is told to move backward, then it will move rover unit away from the direction it’s facing
Hmm, based on our previous experience with implementing MoveForward, I have a good idea of the requirements and after double-checking with our Subject Matter Expert, we confirm that our assumption is correct and derive the following requirements.
Given the Rover is facing North, when it moves forward, then its Y value decreases by 1
Given the Rover is facing South, when it moves forward, then its Y value increases by 1
Given the Rover is facing East, when it moves forward, then its X value decreases by 1
Given the Rover is facing East, when it moves forward, then its X value increases by 1
Great, we have enough information to get started so we can start demonstrating the software and get quicker feedback!
Not too shabby, we’ve got enough code in place to make everything pass so let’s take a look at refactoring. From the business rules, MoveBackward is too simple to need a refactor, though I have a suspicion about what the final look of the method will look like. From the test code, the test is pretty straightforward and looks a ton like the tests we wrote for MoveForward.
With all of that in mind, let’s go ahead and commit these changes and go to the next requirement!
Once again, now that we have passing tests, is there anything we want to refactor? The business rules look to be simple enough so I don’t feel the need to refactor those. When we look at the test code, the test seems straightforward and I’m not sure what I’d simplify.
Time to commit these changes and on to the next requirement.
With everything passing again, we can pause to rethink about refactoring but so far so good from my perspective. There are maybe some superficial changes that could be made, but I can’t make a strong enough argument to implement them.
Overall, Rover is looking to be in a good spot, however, one thing that stands out is that MoveForward and MoveBackward look similar due to their matching if statements. When I see duplication like this, I start thinking about how possible refactoring techniques to reduce the duplication. However, it can be tough to see a pattern before it establishes.
When it comes to refactoring to a pattern, I like to have three or more examples so I have a better idea of what use cases need to be supported. A common mistake I see developers make is that they start implementing a pattern before really understanding the problem. My approach is to refactor to a pattern when it makes sense and not before.
Circling back to this duplicated ifs, I’ve got a hunch that TurnLeft and TurnRight will follow a similar approach but I’m curious to know what they’re going to look like and I don’t want to refactor too early. So taking my own advice, I’m going to go ahead and skip refactoring MoveForward and MoveBackward until I at implement TurnLeft as that may change my approach.
Just like that, we now have a Rover that knows how to both MoveForward and MoveBackward! Like before, we first started by examining the requirements and coming up with our various test cases. From there, we were able to drive out the functionality by using red-green-refactor and building our software with tests. In the next post, we’ll take a look at implementing the logic for turning left!
Welcome to the fifth installment of Learning Through Example – Mars Rover! In this post, we’ll pick up from where we left on with Rover and start digging into how to make it move forward! We’ll first examine what it means for the Rover to move forward by looking over the requirements in deeper detail. Once we have a better understanding, we’ll start driving out the functionality by focusing on a simple case and building more complexity. By the end of this post, we’ll have a Rover that will know how to move forward when facing any Direction!
If we look back at the original requirements for moving forward, we find this single line with regards to moving forward
When the rover is told to move forward, then it will move one rover unit in the direction it’s facing
Super helpful, right? I don’t know about you, but this not nearly enough information for us to start our work because I’m not sure what that actually means!
In this case, we will have a more in-depth conversation with our Subject Matter Expert and we’ll find out that depending on the Orientation of the Rover the Rover‘s Location will change. Through additional conversations, we end up figuring out some more concrete business rules for when the Rover moves forward.
Given the Rover is facing North, when it moves forward, then its Y value increases by 1
Given the Rover is facing South, when it moves forward, then its Y value decreases by 1
Given the Rover is facing East, when it moves forward, then its X value increases by 1
Given the Rover is facing East, when it moves forward, then its X value decreases by 1
Great, we have enough information to get started so we can start demonstrating the software and get quicker feedback!
Let’s begin writing our first test for the Rover moving forward! We’ll be leveraging the same naming guidelines mentioned in part three to help make the use cases standout in our tests
So far, so good! The test matches the intent behind the name and a new developer can see that we’ve created a Rover facing North, called its MoveForward method and making sure that the Y property is 1.
If we try running the test, it will fail because Rover doesn’t have a MoveForward method, so let’s go ahead and write a simple implementation.
The error is caused due to the interaction of struct and the Location property implementation. If you recall, structs are value types which means when you assign them to a variable, the variable has its own copy of the struct, not the reference.
// Let's create a locationvarlocation=newCoordinate{X=0,Y=0};// And now let's have newLocation have the same value, NOTE: This isn't a reference to location!varnewLocation=location;// And if we check if both are equal, they are!Console.WriteLine(location.Equals(newLocation));// True// Now let's change location's X valuelocation.X=200;// That works just fine, but if we check what newLocation is, we see that it's stil (0, 0)Console.WriteLine($"newLocation = ({newLocation.X}, {newLocation.Y})");// Which means when we compare, they're not the same!Console.WriteLine(location.Equals(newLocation));// False
So what does that have to do with the Location property? Well, we’ve defined it as an auto-property which is syntactic sugar for telling the compiler to generate a backing field for the property and to implement default get and set logic.
// Given this definition of RoverpublicclassRover{publicCoordinateLocation{get;set}}// This is syntactic sugar for the followingpublicclassRover{privateCoordinate_location;publicCoordinateLocation{get=>_location;set=>_location=value;}}
So the problem arises from how get is working. It’s returning the backing field which is going to be stored as a variable for use. Recall from above that when we do that type of assignment, we’re working on a copy of the value. So if we try to make changes to the copy, the changes won’t make it back to the backing field which in turn won’t ever update the Location property!
So good job on the compiler letting us know that there’s a problem even if the message is a bit obscure! But how do we fix the problem? Well, to get the code to compile, instead of updating the Y property of Location, let’s go ahead and update the entire Location property instead.
For those keeping track at home, we’re doing a pretty good job of following Test Drive Development (TDD) principles in that we first wrote a failing test, then wrote enough code to make it pass. The third step is to refactor our code (both production and test) to make it easier to work with or to make it more robust.
If we take a look at the MoveForward method, it’s pretty simple and there’s not much we can refactor there for now.
Looking at this code, one thing that stands out is that we’re checking that Y got updated, but we’re not verifying that X nor the Orientation didn’t change. In fact, if we change the implementation of MoveForward to set the X value to be 200 and change the Orientation to be South, the test would still pass and it clearly shouldn’t!
Thankfully, we can mediate this oversight by creating an expectedLocation which will have the expected X and Y values for the Rover. In addition, we’ll update one Assert to use this new value and add another Assert to verify the Orientation
Nice! We’re now much more explicit about our expectations of Rover should be at this exactLocation and should have this exactOrientation, otherwise, fail the test.
While looking at this test, there’s one more subtle issue with code, can you spot it?
We’re making an assumption about what the initial Location for the Rover! What if the Rover started off at (5, 5) instead of (0, 0)? This test would fail, but not for the right reason (an error in the production code), but due to fragility in the way the test was written.
If we wanted to harden this test, we have two approaches
We could change our Arrange step to explicitly set the initial location of Rover to be (0, 0). This would guarantee the initial setup and if the default Location were to ever change, our test would still pass.
When we look at this test and the code we’re testing, the key thing that we’re wanting to test is that the right value was modified correctly (in this case either by +1 or -1). Given that, we could update our Arrange step to capture what the initial Location was and then update our Assert step to know about the location.
Now that we have a passing test for Rover and moving forward, let’s go ahead and implement another piece of functionality by writing a test for when the Rover is facing South
Now that we have a passing test suite again, is there anything we want to refactor? Are there any patterns starting to emerge?
From the business code, MoveForward seems pretty straightforward and I’m not sure what refactor I could do there that would make a lot of sense right now.
If we take a look at the test code, I’m noticing that our two tests so far look almost like carbon copies of each other. In fact, if we take a closer look, it seems like the only differences between the two tests are the Rover‘s Orientation and the expectedLocation. I’m really tempted to refactor this code to be a bit more DRY and remove some duplication. However, I’ve only seen two examples so far and before I refactor to a pattern, I actually want the pattern to manifest first so I know what the pattern is.
Let’s keep writing some more tests and see what pattern emerges!
If we look at the production code, I’m getting really tired of having to write Location = new Coordinate {X=Location.X..., Y=Location.Y...} because I know I’m going to have to write this similar logic for the last remaining test for moving forward and probably something similar for moving backward.
Looking at the way we’ve been modifying Coordinate, it seems like we’re every modifying X or Y by a set amount, so what if we wrote some methods that could adjust either X or Y?
If we take a look at Coordinate, it seems like we have a struct with the two properties in mention, so let’s add a method called AdjustXBy that will return a new Coordinate with X adjusted by that value and keep Y the same
Even in this small example, this addition is already more concise of our intent than the other two cases. After doing a quick verification that the test still passes (otherwise the refactor isn’t a refactor), let’s go ahead and add a new method to Coordinate called AdjustYBy that is similar to AdjustXBy
After making that much change to the production code, we’ll go ahead and run our test suite again and it seems like the change is working as expected, nice!
Now that we’ve refactored the business rules and our test suite is passing correctly, we can take a look at refactoring our test code. With the addition of the East test, the tests are definitely following a pattern and I should be able to extract out that logic to a single test and then pass in different parameters (even though the link is to NUnit, most test frameworks support this concept).
Given the differences between the tests, we would need to extract the starting Direction and the expectedLocation to be parameters. However, the expectedLocation is based on the initialLocation which is currently based on whatever the Rover defaults to.
Based on that chain, if we wanted to do this refactor, we would have to pass in a Rover as the parameter and I really don’t like that idea because if Rover grows to be bigger, then creating a Rover becomes more involved and I don’t want to inflict that onto my test. In addition, one thing that is nice about our tests is that they’re easy to read and to follow their logic which has a ton of value given that developers spend more time reading code than writing code.
All of that to say, that even though the tests look similar, I’m going to pass on refactoring to a single unified test because I’d be trading readability for removing duplication and these tests are small enough that I don’t think it’s that much technical debt to take on.
With the latest test, we’re 3/4 of the way through implementing MoveForward, so let’s go ahead and write another failing test for when the Rover faces West.
And with this latest addition, not only do we have a passing test suite, but we’ve also covered the business rules for when the Rover moves forward, completing this part of the kata, nice!
As a recap, here’s what Rover and WhenMovingForward looks like
With this final test in place, we have the core functionality for when the Rover moves forward. In addition, we’ve written enough tests and functionality now that if requirements were to change, we have a pretty good guess on what the work involved would be. In the next part of the kata, we’ll start implementing a new piece of functionality!
In this installment of the Mars Rover kata, we’re going to start implementing the Rover type! First, we’re going to review the models that we derived in Part 2 of the series. From there, we’ll take a look at the various requirements and see which piece to start implementing. From there, we’ll write our first tests, driving the new functionality and running into a snag or two on the way. By the end of this post, we’ll be one requirement down for the kata and have a better understanding of the Rover type!
As a recap, we’ve derived the following models and implementations for the kata so far. For this post, we’re going to be spending the majority of our time working with Rover, but it’s good to know what our base looks like.
When I begin a new feature, one thing that I’m always thinking about is how do I break down the work ahead of me in such a way that I can start delivering value much faster. This doesn’t mean that I’m skipping on quality, but it does mean that I value quicker feedback than 100% test coverage. With that being said, when I look at the requirements, something that I can implement pretty quickly is that when the Rover starts, it should be at (0, 0) facing North.
Like everything in development, there are multiple ways we could implement this functionality
Provide a default constructor for Rover that sets those values explicitly
Update the Program.cs file to set those values for Rover
With the first approach, we’re encoding this business rule into the Rover type and forcing that when anyone creates an instance of Rover, it will always be at (0, 0) facing North which is a nice way of putting the business rule into the right component.
With the second approach, we’re going to let Rover be a dumb component and have some other component decide these values. The downside to this approach is that if there’s an error with Rover, we won’t know if it’s because of how Rover is behaving or how it was created.
Both approaches are valid, so I’m just going to pick one and use that for now. If later down the road we need to make a change, we’ll update as needed. With that being said, I’m leaning towards the first approach, so let’s go ahead and write our first unit test on making sure that Rover is facing North.
We don’t have any constructors defined nor are we setting values for the two properties, so how does it know that Orientation is North?
Magic?
Not quite! Since we’re not setting any value for Orientation, it will be whatever the default value for Direction is. We can determine that by using the default operator in C#.
So what’s happening here is that when the Rover is created, it looks for any logic in the default constructor. Since there isn’t one, it will set default values to both properties. For Orientation, that value will be 0 and by default, it will be the first value listed in the Direction enum.
So for fun, if we change North to be the second choice in Direction
Failing unit test for Mars Rover as the expected value was North, but the value was South.
I don’t know about you, but someone changing the ordering of an enum shouldn’t be causing a failing test. Luckily, resolving this issue is as simple as explicitly stating the Orientation in Rover‘s default constructor.
[Test]publicvoidThenTheRoverIsAt00(){// Arrange and Actvarrover=newRover();varexpectedLocation=newCoordinate{X=0,Y=0};Assert.AreEqual(expectedLocation,rover.Location);}
When we run the test, we get the following error:
Failed test for Rover since it was expecting a Coordinate, but the Location was null.
Ah, yeah, that makes sense, Location is a Coordinate which is an object. Because we’ve not explicitly set Location, the default value is null.
publicclassRover{publicDirectionOrientation{get;set;}publicCoordinateLocation{get;set;}publicRover(){Orientation=Direction.North;Location=newCoordinate(){X=0,Y=0};}}````Solet’sre-runourtestnow.```csharp[Test]publicvoidThenTheRoverIsAt00(){// Arrange and Actvarrover=newRover();varexpectedLocation=newCoordinate{X=0,Y=0};Assert.AreEqual(expectedLocation,rover.Location);}
Failed unit test since the expected coordinate is not the same as the actual coordinate..
When we leverage Assert.AreEqual, under the hood, it’s leveraging the built-in Equals method for the values being passed in. For primitive types, this will do a comparison by values, but if we’re comparing objects, then it will do comparison by reference.
Given this, the problem we’re running into now is that even though I have two Coordinates that have the same value, since they are two different objects, then Assert.AreEqual will fail. We’ve got a couple of different ways to solve this problem.
One way to solve the problem is by overriding the Equals method on the Coordinate class and override the logic so that two Coordinates are the same if all of their properties are the same. This is a pretty solid approach to take if that’s how equality should work everywhere. With that being said, here are some things to keep in mind when using this technique.
First, if the class gains a new property, you will need to remember to update the Equals method, otherwise, you’ll get interesting behavior when two objects that have a single difference are being treated as the same.
Next, if you override Equals, then you must override GetHashCode as well. If you fail to do this, this will generate a warning during compilation time, but the bigger problem is that for two objects that are the same based on the definition of Equals but hash differently, then you will fail to find the item correctly in Dictionary and HashSet structures. When implementing GetHashCode, you should use the same properties for hashing as you would for equality checking.
Overall, I will use this approach if equality for this type needs to be by value for everywhere in the application but this isn’t my favorite approach because developers need to remember to update both Equals and GetHashCode when new properties are added.
The second approach we can take to have equality by value is by changing our type for Coordinate from a class to a struct. The cool thing about structs is that they by default handle equality by value so if you do need to add another property, things will work as expected. However, like all things in software, there are a couple of things to be aware of.
First, structs have to have an empty, default constructor. So if there are some validation rules that need to be checked in the constructor, there’s no way to force that to happen. Another effect of this drawback is that if a struct needs two things to exist or it shouldn’t be created, you can’t force callers to pass them in which can play havoc with making illegal states unrepresentable.
Second, when working with structs, and you change one of the properties, you’re modifying a copy of the struct and not the original version.
publicstructDate{publicintMonth{get;set;}publicintDay{get;set;}publicintYear{get;set;}}publicclassOrder{publicDateTransactionDate{get;set;}publicdecimalTotal{get;set;}}varorder=newOrder{Total=9.99m};// at this point, Order will have a Date of 0/00/0000order.TransactionDate=newDate{Month=6,Day=22,Year=2020};// Order has a new date!order.TransactionDate.Day=23// Fail to compile => Cannot modify the return value of `TransactionDate`// because it is not a variable
It’s not a problem if you replace the whole struct value, but if you only want to change a part of it, you’ll need to replace the whole value. If you’ve ever worked with the DateTime type, you’ll notice that you can’t change values, but you can create a new DateTime value with updated properties.
Overall, I prefer this approach when modeling values where dependencies aren’t required and there’s not a need for validation logic.
The third approach you can take when checking if things are equal is by defining a custom Equals method that lives in my test suite and is only used for testing. The benefit of this approach is that I can now verify my objects by value, without the need of overriding two different methods. In addition, since this type of equality is only needed for testing, I can now have this logic live in the test project. In addition, I can still have validation logic and non-default constructors for my classes.
The main downside to this approach is that if there’s a new property added to the class that you’ve written custom equality logic for, you’ll need to update this method as well.
Overall, I prefer this approach when I need equality by value for testing purposes only and I don’t want to make wide-sweeping changes by changing my type from class to struct.
Now that we have some more information about why the test failed and a few different approaches, let’s take a look at what approach makes sense here. First off, Coordinates really don’t have any validation logic. Second, in our system, if we have two Coordinates with the same values, then they should be considered the same. Given these assumptions, I’m going to go ahead and change the type definition from class to struct.
In this post, we started writing tests on Rover. We started off by adding a default constructor which sets the Orientation to Direction.North and explored about how setting defaults explicitly can protect us from changes in the future. From there, we wrote a test on Location and learned about how Assert.AreEquals leverages default equality and a few different approaches to solving this problem. Now that we have a way to assert against Orientation and Location, we can start writing tests for when the rover moves forward!
The goal of this post isn’t to try to convince you that you should be unit testing your code, but to give you enough information that if you need to unit test your code or if you’re in a codebase that expects tests, you will have the knowledge to hold your own. If you are looking for reasons why you should be testing, there are some great resources in the Additional Resources section at the end of the post!
At its core, unit testing is the practice of writing code that tests that your code is working correctly. Confused? It’ll make sense in a minute, I promise! If you’ve ever made changes to a project, how confident were you that your changes worked? If I had to guess, there’s a high level of confidence that your changes solved the problem. However, how confident were you that your changes didn’t break some other piece of functionality? I imagine that your confidence is a bit lower. For me, I’m reasonably confident that my changes are solid, but I’m not always sure that I didn’t break some other features elsewhere. The most straightforward approach to verify everything is working correctly is to run the application and try it out, right?
For small applications, that’s a pretty reasonable approach to take and wouldn’t take too much time. However, what if you’re working on a more complicated application? How much time is it taking for you to compile the application, launch it, and start navigating through the UI? The premise of unit testing is that we can exercise the same logic that’s running in the application but without having to go through the interface. This type of testing is generally faster and less error-prone since your test code will do the same tests over and over again. The downside is that you’ll spend more time writing code, but for me, I feel much more confident in my work when I can run the full test suite and know pretty quickly if I’ve broken something.
If you’ve been following along with the Mars Rover kata series then you know I’m a huge fan of using the same language as my Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) when it comes to the problem at hand as it prevents confusion when different terminology is used for the same concept.
When it comes to naming my tests, I take this approach one step further and name my tests in such a manner that if you read the class name followed by the method, then you’ll have a clear idea of what the test’s intent is. The main reason I name my tests this way is that if my test fails, I want to know what requirement or workflow is not working so I can see if it makes sense for that workflow to be impacted.
Sometimes, a test will start to fail because requirements have changed, so the test needs to be updated or removed. In other cases, the test failure reveals a contradiction in rules so it helps me if I can clearly see the use case and ask the right questions to my SMEs.
When it comes to naming my test classes and method, I borrow inspiration from the Given/When/Then naming methodology. I came across this convention when learning about Behavior Driven Development (BDD) early on in my career but I was familiar with the naming convent from working with user stories. The intent of Given/When/Then is that it provides the context, an action, and a result. Going to Mars Rover, an example user story would be
Given that the rover is at (0, 0) facing North, when it receives the move forward command, then it should be at (0, 1) facing North
Let’s break this user story down and examine the various parts:
The Given portion of the user story sets up the context of the application. It can be as simple as Given that the user is logged into the system or as complex as Given that today is a holiday and that a user wants to make a reservation. The goal here is that someone can read this portion of the story and understand what is being accomplished. For this user story, the context is that we have a Rover that’s located at (0, 0) facing North.
The When portion of the user story gives what action is being taken in the application. At this level, we’d typically stay away from technical jargon (i.e. the user clicks the reservation button) and focus more on the workflow being accomplished. For this user story, the action is that the Rover received the Move Forward command.
The Then portion of the user story tells us what the expected result or behavior is. It can be as simple as then the total is $42.55 or as complex as then the sale is declined and the user is informed that there was an issue processing the payment. For this user story, we’re expecting that after the Rover receives the Move Forward command, then the rover is at (0, 1) facing North.
Now that we’ve learned a bit more about Given/When/Then, let’s talk about how this can influence your test structure. When I’m writing tests, I’ll typically place them in a unit test project that’s separate from production code so that we don’t deploy the unit tests with the production code.
In the case of Mars Rover, if I have a project called MarsRover, then I’d have a project called MarsRover.UnitTests. Once I have this new project created, I’ll create a folder called xyzTests where xyz is the name of the class I’m writing tests against. So if I’m writing tests against the Rover class in the MarsRover project, then I would have a folder called RoverTests in the MarsRover.UnitTests project.
Project naming conventions outlined in red. The test class and folder naming conventions outlined in blue
From here, I’ll generally create a file per method or workflow that I want to test for the class. So based on our user story above, I would have a file called WhenMovingForward and this file will contain all the different tests for this functionality. Once a file is in place, we can start writing the various test methods for different behaviors. When naming methods, I will include the context for the setup and what the expectations were. By combining the test name and the method name, it will sound like a user story.
VS Code Test Runner showing test classes with test names
At this point, we have the infrastructure in place for our tests, so how do we write a good test? Every good test will have three parts, Arrange, Act, and Assert. In the Arrange step, we’re going to focus on creating dependencies and getting the initial state setup for the test. For simple tests, this step may only consist of creating the class that we’re testing. For more complicated tests, there may be more dependencies to create, some methods to call, and possibly modifying the local environment. The Act step is where the method or property that we’re testing is called. This step should be the simplest portion of the test since it should only be a line or two of code. The third and final step is the Assert step where we check that the result we observed was correct. For simple tests, this could be a single line where check a value whereas more complicated tests may need to check various properties.
Using WhenMovingForward as an example, here’s what an example test might look like.
I like to think of Arrange/Act/Assert (AAA) as a science experiment because we have to first find a hypothesis, design some test to prove or disprove the hypothesis, get all the necessary ingredients together for the test, run the test, and see if we have evidence to support our hypothesis.
In this post, we took a brief break from the Mars Rover kata to get a quick understanding of unit testing and the naming conventions we’ll be leveraging for the rest of the series! We first talked about the importance of naming and how if we follow Given, When, Then syntax, we can turn our user stories into readable test names for future engineers. From there, I showed you Arrange, Act, Assert notation for tests, and an example test using the convention. Next time, we’ll start implementing Rover!
In this installment, we’ll be looking at the problem description for Mars Rover. After becoming more familiar with the problem, we’ll start by identifying the terminology that we should be using when talking about the problem by defining a ubiquitous language. From there, I’ll show you how to break down the problem into various concepts and how to find the relationships between the various pieces. By the end of this post, you should feel comfortable exploring a new domain, understanding the terminology used, and defining relationships.
Congratulations and welcome to the S.P.A.C.E¹ Institute, good to have you aboard! Our big focus for the year is to develop a rover that can navigate the surface of Mars! While the engineers are working on the design and building of the rover, we can focus on building the navigation module and start iterating on its design. With that in mind, here are a couple of assumptions we’re going to make for this version.
The rover will be traveling on a two-dimensional plane that should be modeled as a coordinate (X, Y)
The rover is guaranteed to be able to travel in a chosen direction (no worries about obstacles or other landmarks)
Given the above assumptions, here are the business rules that the emulation will need to follow
When the emulation starts, the rover will always be at (0, 0) and facing North
There are a series of commands that the rover can receive that can change its location or direction
When the rover is told to move forward, then it will move one rover unit in the direction it’s facing
When the rover is told to move backward, then it will move rover unit away from the direction it’s facing
When the rover is told to turn left, it will rotate 90 degrees to the left, but not change its location
When the rover is told to turn right, it will rotate 90 degrees to the right, but not change its location
When the emulation is told to quit, the rover will stop receiving commands
For the emulation, valid directions include North, East, South, and West
In order to help troubleshoot failures with the emulation, every time a command is received, both the command received, the rover’s location, and the rover’s orientation should be logged.
When building software, I want to understand the various business terms that are being used to describe the problem so that when I’m talking to subject matter experts (SMEs), I’m using the same terminology as they are. For those who are familiar with Domain-Driven Design, this practice of using the same terminology is known as defining a ubiquitous language and the goal is to make sure that when someone says Command, then we are all referring to the same concept. If you’ve ever worked in a codebase where something was called one thing, but the business referred to it as something different, then you are familiar with the pain of having to map between the two concepts.
When working to define the ubiquitous language, a common approach is to find the nouns that are being used in the description as this can create the foundation of your classes (if following Object-Oriented principles) or your types (if following Functional Programming principles).
Looking over the description again, these nouns stood out to me:
Domain models: Rover, Command, Location, Direction, and Orientation
Once the nouns have been found, I’ll pivot to finding out how these different concepts are related to each other. One approach to finding these relationships is using “has-a” and “is-a” relationships. At a high level, if two things are related through “has-a”, then those concepts should be composed together. If two concepts have an “is-a” relationship, then I know that the concepts should be interchangeable for one another.
To help identify these relationships, I would work with the SME to understand what each of these concepts means and how they relate to each other. Since it’ll be a bit hard to simulate a conversation, here’s the information that we would learn from our SME.
A Rover has a Location and an Orientation
Orientation is the Direction that a Rover is facing
Location is the coordinates that the Rover is located at
A Command is something that a Rover receives from the User
A Direction can be North, East, South, or West
A Command can be Move Forward, Move Backward, Turn Left, Turn Right, or Quit
With this new understanding, our concepts and relationships would look something like this:
Domain model relationships where Rover has a Location and an Orientation. Orientation is a Direction and Command is not related to anything.
In this post, we explored the problem description for the Mars Rover kata and built up our understanding of the various concepts by exploring the nouns. After finding the nouns, we leveraged “has-a” and “is-a” thinking to come up with a rough idea of how the various concepts related to one another. In the next post, we’ll be focusing on how to model these concepts in code!
Over my career, I’ve spent a lot of time bringing new engineers up to speed on how to break down problems, how to write better code, and how to write automated tests. What I’ve come to find out is that there are a ton of resources on how to do each of these things individually, but not very many that brings all of these concepts together in one place. The purpose of this series is to bring all of these ideas together as we solve the Mars Rover kata.
For new engineers, this kata has about the right amount of complexity to explore these various concepts and help identify things to improve on. As a team lead at SentryOne, I’ve onboard interns and our associate engineers using this kata as a launch point to teach them the tooling and processes we use. In addition, this kata serves as a method to evaluate their current skills so we can help round out a solid foundation for their career.
By the end of this series, you will have a better understanding of how to break down a problem into small, deliverable pieces while being able to write tests around new functionality. Even though there will be a lot of code to look at, none of these concepts are technology-specific so I challenge you to follow along with your tech stack of choice and see how you would implement some of these concepts in that stack.
On the topic of technologies, I’ll be using the following for my implementation of this kata. As long as you find the relevant tool for your technology stack, you should be able to follow along!
In the last post, we took a look at the problem description for Mars Rover and developed a set of concepts for the problem. From these concepts, we were able to develop common terminology and determine the relationships between the concepts. In this post, I’m going to show how I think about software design in general and how to apply them when modeling in code.
As a note, I’ll be showing code in both C# (for Object-Oriented approaches) and F# (for Functional Programming approaches). Once again, these concepts are fundamentals, but depending on your technology stack, the implementations will vary.
When I’m designing my models, my end goal is to produce software that captures the problem at hand using the same terms that the business uses. By striving for this goal, I can have richer conversations with my stakeholders when I run into interesting interactions of various business rules and can speak to them using the right terminology. In addition to capturing the problem, I will focus on designing my models in such a way that a developer can’t violate a business rule because the code won’t compile. At this point, I would have made illegal states unrepresentable in my code.
I first came across this term while reading Scott Wlashcin‘s work on the terrific F# for Fun and Profit website and it immediately resonated with me. I’ve definitely been bitten before working in a codebase where I wrote some code that compiled but blew up in my face during runtime because the parameter I passed in wasn’t valid for the method I was calling. Wouldn’t it be nice if the compiler told me while I was writing the code that what I was doing wouldn’t work? By thinking a bit more about the models being used and what some of their properties are, we can make this goal achievable.
If the type has a finite number of valid values, then we can remove error conditions by defining the type to only be one of those possible options. For those from an Object-Oriented background, enums are a great example of modeling these types as you can explicitly set a label for the different values. For those from a Functional background, sum types are a great way to model these choices.
Some examples of such a type include the states in the U.S., the suits for a deck of playing cards, or the months in a year.
For other types, however, there are so many possible valid values that it’s impossible to list all of them. For example, if we were looking at valid house numbers for an address, any positive integer would be valid so good luck on defining every positive number as an enum or sum type.
In these cases, I will leverage built-in primitives to model the concept at first. So in the case of HouseNumber, an integer might be a good enough spot to start. However, if I then find myself writing code that can work on integers, but shouldn’t work on HouseNumbers, then I might wrap a stronger type around the integer (see below).
// If the value isn't a major component of the design, we can use a primitive typeinthouseNumber;// However, if the type is a major concept to the domain at hand,// it makes sense to lift it to its own typepublicclassHouseNumber{publicintValue{get;}publicStreetNumber(intinput){// validation logicValue=input;}}// The difference between the two approaches is that in the first case, this would workinthouseNumber=400;Math.Sqrt(houseNumber);// But this wouldn'tvarhouseNumber=newHouseNumber(400);Math.Sqrt(houseNumber);// fails to compile with "cannot convert from HouseNumber to double"
// If the value isn't a major component of the design, we can use a primitive typelethouseNumber:int;// However, if the type is a major concept to the domain at hand,// it makes sense to lift it to its own type (single case sum type)typeHouseNumber=HouseNumberofint// The difference between the two approaches is that in the first case, this would worklethouseNumber=400;Math.Sqrt(houseNumber);// But this wouldn'tlethouseNumber=HouseNumber400Math.Sqrt(houseNumber);// fails to compile with// "This expression was expected to have type 'float' but here has type 'HouseNumber'"
As the saying goes, large programs are built by composing a bunch of smaller programs, and types are no different. As we begin to model more complicated types, it’s natural to start thinking about types being composed of other types. For these types, we’ll leverage either objects (if following OO) or records (if following FP).
One way you can determine if you’re needing a composite type like this is if you find yourself using the word and or has when describing the type, then it’s a composition. For example:
An Address has a HouseNumber, it has a StreetName, it has a State.
An Address consists of a HouseNumber and a StreetName and a State
Now that we’ve talked about some different modeling techniques, let’s see how we can apply those rules as we start to model Mars Rover. From the previous post, we were able to derive the following concepts and relationships:
A Rover has a Location and an Orientation
Orientation is the Direction that a Rover is facing
Location is the coordinates that the Rover is located at
A Command is something that a Rover receives from the User
A Direction can be North, East, South, or West
A Command can be Move Forward, Move Backward, Turn Left, Turn Right, or Quit
Yielding the following graph
Domain model relationships where Rover has a Location and an Orientation. Orientation is a Direction and Command is not related to anything.
Given the above rules, we can start taking a look at how to model these in code! We’ll first start with the models that don’t have a dependency, and then build up from there
From the above requirements, Direction can only be one of four possible values (North, East, South, West). So based on that, it looks like we can leverage the first rule and model Direction like so:
From the above requirements, Command can only be one of five possible values (MoveForward, MoveBackward, TurnLeft, TurnRight, and Quit). Based on that, we can once again leverage the first rule and model Command like so:
After talking more with our Subject Matter Expert, a Location is the Coordinate where the Rover is located.
Aha! A new concept!
When we ask additional questions, we find out that a Coordinate refers to the Cartesian Coordinate System and for the problem we’re solving, we can assume that a Coordinate represents two numbers where the first number represents the location from the x-axis and the second number represents the location from the y-axis.
With this new information, our mental model has changed to be the following
Domain model relationships where Rover has a Location and an Orientation. Location is a Coordinate where Coordinate has an X and Y value. Orientation is a Direction and Command is not related to anything.
Going into further discussion, we find out that both X and Y will be whole numbers for our emulation and that they can be negative. Based on these properties, it sounds like X and Y can be modeled as integers and therefore fall under the second rule.
Given that a Coordinate has to have both an X and Y value, it sounds like Coordinate falls under the third rule and that this concept is a composition of X and Y.
From the above requirements, it seems like Orientation is what we call the Direction that the Rover is facing. Based on that, this sounds like a property that Rover would have.
Now that we have both the Direction and Coordinate concepts designed, we can start designing Rover. From the requirements, it looks like Rover is a combination of Direction (known as Orientation) and a Coordinate (known as a Location). Based on that, Rover falls under the third rule and looks like the following.
In this post, we implemented the basic types needed to solve the Mars Rover kata! We first started by taking a look at the concepts identified earlier and thought about the characteristics of the type which helped guide us to build software that both uses the terms of the problem domain and also prevents us from creating errors by making illegal states unrepresentable. In the next post, we’ll start adding functionality to our application.
I’ve found that interviewing for a new job can be super stressful and it reminds me of speed dating, “Let’s get to know each other over the next few hours to see if this relationship can work”. With such a short time window, there’s not much time to ask “fluff” questions like “if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be”. Instead, I’m more likely to ask some of the following questions to get a better understanding of what I’m about to step into. If the company can’t answer some of these questions, it’s not a deal breaker, but can be a red flag about this place.
With that being said, I hope these questions help you during your interviewing process!
What was a stumbling block for over the past year?
What does your ideal customer look like?
What is your business model (i.e. how does make its money)?
Any thoughts of expanding to other markets (such as, if the company sells a particular type of medical device, are there any thoughts of making other devices or add-ons for the main device)? If not, why?
Who would you say are your biggest competitors? What differentiates you from them?
How many vacation days? How many sick days? Are they from the same bucket (i.e PTO) or different buckets?
Is there a 401(K)? If so, what’s the vesting period (i.e. how long until the employer contributions become yours)? What’s the employer contribution?
Is there a training budget? If so, is it per person, per team, per department? What do you typical training expenses look like (books, videos, conferences, or in person training)?
When does open enrollment begin for insurance? Am I covered on day one or is there a waiting period?
So the code is pretty straight forward, I have a PermissionChecker whose job is to use the IModuleDisabler to turn off certain modules depending upon the user permissions. Pretty straightforward implementation.
Now that the solution is fleshed out, it’s time to write some tests around this. When it comes to testing classes that have dependencies on non-trivial classes, I use NSubstitute, a mocking tool, to create mock versions of those dependencies. In this case, NSubstitute allows me to test how the IModuleDisabler is being used by the PermissionsChecker.
For example, let’s say that I wanted to test how the PermissionChecker interacts with the IModuleDisabler when the user has a partial access, I’d write a test that looks like the following:
In the above test, our assertion step is to check if the mockDisabler received a single call to the DisableReportModule. If it didn’t receive a call, then the test fails. We can write similar tests for the different modules that should be disabled for the partial rights permission and follow a similar pattern for the full rights permission.
However, things get a bit more interesting when we’re testing what happens if the user is an admin. If we follow the same pattern, we’d end up with a test that looks like this:
The issue arises when we add a new module to be disabled which forces the IModuleDisabler to implement a new method. In that case, you need to remember to update this test to also check that the new method wasn’t being called. If you forget, this test would still pass, but it’d pass for the wrong reason.
To help illustrate, let’s say that another method, DisableImportModule, has been added to the IModuleDisabler interface. In addition, we also need to make sure that this is called when users have partial access, but should not be called for users who are admins or users who have full access.
To fulfill those requirements, we modify the PermissionChecker as so:
At this point, we’d write another test for when the a user has partial access, the import module should be disabled. However, it’s very unlikely that we’d remember to update the test for the admin. Remember, for the admin, we’re checking that it received no calls to any disable methods and the way we’re doing that is by checking each method individually.
[Test]publicvoidAnd_the_user_has_admin_permissions_then_the_disabler_is_not_used(){// ArrangevarpermissionChecker=newPermissionChecker();varmockDisabler=Substitute.For();varuser=newUser{IsAdmin=true};// ActpermissionChecker.CheckPermissions(mockDisabler,user);// AssertmockDisabler.DidNotReceive().DisableSystemAdminModule();mockDisabler.DidNotReceive().DisableReportModule();mockDisabler.DidNotReceive().DisableUserManagementModule();// Need to add check for DidNotReceive().DisableImportModule();}
There’s got to be a better way. After some digging around, I found that any NSubstitute mock, has a ReceivedCalls method that returns all calls that the mock received. With this new knowledge, we can refactor the previous test with the following:
This solution is much better because if we add more modules, this test is still checking to make sure that admin users do not have any modules disabled.
When using a NSubstitute mock and you need to make sure that it received no calls to any methods or properties, you can using NSubstitute’s ReceivedCalls in conjunction with CollectionAssert.IsEmpty to ensure that the substitute was not called.
In this post, I’m going to solve a logic puzzle using C# and F#. First, I’ll define the problem being solved and what our restrictions are. Next, I’ll show how I’d break down the problem and write an easy-to-read, extendable solution using idiomatic C#. Afterwards, I’ll solve the same problem and write an easy-to-read, extendable solution writing in idiomatic F#. Finally, we’ll compare the two solutions and see why the F# solution is the better solution.
For this problem, I’m going to write a constraint solver (thanks to Geoff Mazeroff for the inspiration).
If you’re not familiar with the concept, a constraint is simply some rule that must be followed (such as all numbers must start with a 4). So a constraint solver is something that takes all the constraints and a source of inputs and returns all values that fit all the constraints.
With that being said, our source will be a list of positive integers and our constraints are the following:
4 digits long (so 1000 – 9999)
Must be even (so 1000, 1002, 1004, etc…)
The first digit must match the last digit (2002, 2012, 2022, etc…)
To further restrict solutions, all code will be production ready. This includes handling error conditions (like input being null), being maintainable (easily adding more constraints) and easy to read.
To quickly summarize, we need to find a robust, maintainable, and readable solution to help us find all 4 digit number that are even and that the first and last digit are equal.
For the C# solution, I’m going to need a class for every constraint, a class to execute all constraints against a source (positive integers) and a runner that ties all the pieces together.
Starting with the smaller blocks and building up, I’m going to start with the constraint classes. Each constraint is going to take a single number and will return true if the number follows the constraint, false otherwise.
With that being said, I’d first implement the constraint that all numbers must be 4 digits long
At this point, I have the constraints written, but I need them to follow a general contract so that the Constraint Solver (about to be defined) can take a list of these constraints. I’ll introduce an interface, IConstraint and update my classes to implement that interface.
So now I have the constraints defined and they’re now implementing a uniform interface, I can now create the constraint solver. This class is responsible for taking the list of numbers and the list of constraints and then returning a list of numbers that follow all constraints.
This solution is easily extendable because if we need to add another constraint, we just add another class that implements the IConstraint interface and change the Main method to add an instance of the new constraint to the list of constraints.
Now that we have the C# solution, let’s take a look at how I would solve the problem using F#.
Similar to the C# solution, I’m going to create a function for every constraint, a function to execute all constraints against a source (positive integers) and a runner that ties all the pieces together.
Also similar to the C# solution, I’m going to start with creating the constraints and then work on the constraint solver function.
First, I’d implement that the number must be four digits long constraint.
At this stage in the C# solution, I had to create an interface, IConstraint, so that the constraint solver could take a list of constraints. What’s cool with F# is that I don’t have to define the interface. The F# type inference is saying that each of these functions are taking the same input (some generic `a) and returning a bool, so I can add all of them to the list. This is pretty convenient since I don’t have to worry about this piece of plumbing.
Now that the different constraints are defined, I’d go ahead and write the last function that takes a list of constraints and a list of numbers and returns the numbers that the constraints fit. (Confused by this function? Take a look at Implementing your own version of # List.Filter)
Now that we have both solutions written up, let’s compare and see which solution is better.
First, the same design was used for both solutions. I decided to use this design for both because it’s flexible enough that we could add new constraints if needed (such as, the 2nd digit must be odd). As an example, for the C# solution, I’d create a new class that implemented IConstraint and then update the runner to use the new class. For the F# solution, I’d create a new function and update the runner. So, I’d think it’s safe to say that both solutions score about the same from a maintainability and extendability point of view.
From an implementation perspective, both solutions are production ready since the code handles possible error conditions (C# with null checks in the ConstraintSolver class, F# with none because it doesn’t support null). In addition to being robust, both solutions are readable by using ample whitespace and having all variables, classes, and interfaces clearly described.
With that being said, this is where the similarities end. When we look at how much code was written to solve the problem, we have a stark difference. For the C# solution, I ended up with 48 lines of code (omitting blank lines), however, for the F# solution, it only took 19. Now you could argue that I could have written the C# solution in fewer lines of code by removing curly braces around one line statements or ignoring null inputs. However, this would lead the code to be less robust.
Another difference between the F# solution and C# is that I was able to focus on the solution without having to wire up an interface. You’ll often hear developers talk about the how little plumbing you need for F# to “just work” and this small example demonstrates that point.
Another difference (albeit subtle) is that the F# solution is that I can use the findValidNumbers function with any generic list of values and any generic list of functions that take the generic type and return true/false.
In other words, if I had another constraint problem using strings, I’d still implement the different constraints, but I could use the same findValidNumbers function. At that point, however, I’d probably rename it to findValidValues to signify the generic solution.
What’s awesome about this is that I didn’t have to do any more work to have a generic solution, F# did that for me. To be fair, the C# solution can easily be made generic, but that would have to be a conscious design decision and I think that’s a downside.
In this post, we took a look at solving a number constraint problem by using idiomatic C# and F#. Even though both solutions are easy to read and easy to extend, the F# version was less than 1/2 the size of the C# solution. In addition, I didn’t have to do any plumbing for the F# version, but had to do some for the C# solution, and to top it off, the F# solution is generically solved, whereas the C# solution is not.
