Best practice for debug Asserts during Unit testing

Question

Does heavy use of unit tests discourage the use of debug asserts? It seems like a debug assert firing in the code under test implies the unit test shouldn\'t exist or the d

Answer 1

First to have both Design by Contract assertions and unit tests, your unit testing framework shall be able to catch the assertions. If your unit tests abort because of a DbC abort, then you simply cannot run them. The alternative here is to disable those assertions while running (read compiling) your unit tests.

Since you're testing non-public functions, what is the risk of having a function invoked with invalid argument ? Don't your unit tests cover that risk ? If you write your code following the TDD (Test-Driven Development) technique, they should.

If you really want/need those Dbc-type asserts in your code, then you can remove the unit tests that pass the invalid arguments to the methods having those asserts.

However, Dbc-type asserts can be useful in lower level functions (that is not directly invoked by the unit tests) when you have coarse-grained unit tests.