I Asked Copilot To Write Unit Tests - It Wasn’t Great

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Learn how to harness the power of GitHub Copilot with Visual Studio Code for generating C# unit tests using xUnit. I will walk you through the process, highlighting the strengths and limitations of Copilot, and share valuable tips on developing an effective strategy for writing unit tests.
As you will witness, Copilot often struggles to understand the context and generate test cases that are substantially different from the ones written already - which is the core purpose of testing! In this video, we will experiment with various approaches, such as providing more detailed method signatures and parameter names. Through trial and error, we discover that Copilot might work best when given more explicit guidance through comprehensive method names and parameters rather than using written requests.
In addition to the context-related issues, you will see that Copilot sometimes generates code that doesn't compile or fails to identify corner cases. These are serious impediments when writing unit tests. However, we could overcome these limitations by actively guiding Copilot and serving it with corner cases.
By the end of the video, we successfully implement a function and its corresponding unit tests, showcasing that with the right strategy, Copilot can be an effective tool for writing unit tests.
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[@konradhylton]

"Will it not eat and then prepare it's own dogfood?" Asking the serious questions. Subscribed.

[@silkogelman]

Thank you Zoran, very interesting.
I hope the upcoming Copilot Chat feature will provide more ways to make Copilot produce better tests.

[@zoran-horvat]

I believe so.

[@happy_burger]

TDD application of Copilot would be interesting to see, although I have my doubts))

[@TheSaintsVEVO]

You could press `alt + ]` to cycle through copilot suggestions I believe. So you can try that when it tries to “talk back” to you as you say

[@zoran-horvat]

While that is true that it might sometimes offer a better solution in the alternatives, I never got accustomed to break the flow and read those. Actually, my impression was that using Copilot in that mode of operation doesn't save any time - and that is the primary need I have.
I generally don't need it to write my code, I need it to write it faster than I would do. In that respect, Copilot has one chance to intervene at any given time, and if that is the miss, I get on to writing the solution myself, hoping that it will catch up at some point during the process.

[@EternalSushiLover]

Hi thank you for the video; from my experience, chatgpt4 is quite good at generating code if I first show him templates informing it on how I want my test to look, which nuget (it does well with C# functionnal library LanguageExt), which approach/style etc.); I havent tried for TDD though (kind of scare) but do you think it might be a viable option or does the "context"-problem still holds?

[@1usrname]

Thanks Zoran. I found your coverage of CoPilot very informative. However, I am more interested in TDD and how CoPilot can help. Is it possible to have CoPilot help write code that can pass existing tests?

[@zoran-horvat]

I still haven't experimented with that, because it generally failed to generate good code for any kind of tests. I was more focused on making it write tests first, and that didn't work out well either.

[@hynesie11]

I hope Copilot learns from the changes that developers make to its suggestions.

[@nickbarton3191]

Me, I was screaming TDD from the beginning.

[@scvnthorpe__]

I think a neat approach would be to write unit tests by hand, and then see what AI could do when asked "hey, write this code!"
Could work a treat if you're certain about the units of your design, but the implementation is hard or unknown

[@zoran-horvat]

There will be the video that does that! I am waiting to get access to Copilot X before recording.

[@rammrras9683]

What is TDD?

[@zoran-horvat]

Test-Driven Development

[@m4inline]

Transmitted Dermatology Disease