UBot Network

Logging, Part 2: The Art of Unit Testing

In the previous blog post, we discussed UBot Studio’s new logging commands. I’d now like to explain further implications of the new logging commands, especially the power they give you to automatically test your code.

Writing automated tests is a practice used by the best coders in the world. But even if you’re not a coder at all, tests will make your bots able to withstand anything the internet throws at them. Automated testing is one of the single best practices you can do for keeping bots from breaking, especially when those bots are very large. There are two types of automated tests that we will look at: Unit Tests, and Flow Tests.

The Art of Unit Testing

Another important implication of the changes is that it is now very simple to write unit tests. What is a unit test, you ask? Only one of the most important ideas to come from computer science in the last 20 years or so.

A unit test is a short piece of code that has no purpose other than to ensure some other piece of code is working correctly. By putting a robust suite of unit tests into your code, you can always rest assured that your bot will be as stable and bug-free as possible. This is especially useful for those of us who have created large, complex bots. Trying to make a change in complex code can cause a ripple effect, where one change affects some other bit of code down the line, causing headaches every step of the way. But if you have a good test suite in place, you’ll know right away if something is ever out of place, and you can fix it before it becomes a big mess.

It’s a good idea to keep unit tests out of the main script. The best way to do this is to create a separate tab. Set it to invisible if you need to compile.

Let’s look at what unit testing looks like in UBot Studio. Say we have a simple function:

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