.NET 4.0 code contracts – How will they affect unit testing?

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I don’t think unit testing and contracts interfere with each other that much, and if anything contracts should help unit testing since it removes the need to add tedious repetitive tests for invalid arguments. Contracts specify the minimum you can expect from the function, whereas unit tests attempt to validate the actual behaviour for a particular set of inputs. Consider this contrived example:


public class Order
{
    public IEnumerable Items { get; }
}

public class OrderCalculator
{
    public double CalculateTotal(Order order)
    {
        Contract.Requires(order != null);
        Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<double>() >= 0);

        return 2.0;
    }
}

Clearly the code satisfies the contract, but you’d still need unit testing to validate it actually behaves as you’d expect.

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