Static Typing Gives You a Head Start, Tests Help You Finish

In one of my earlier posts (almost a year back) I had indicated how type driven modeling leads to succinct domain structures that inherit the following goodness :

• Lesser amount of code to write, since the static types encapsulate lots of business constraints
• Lesser amount of tests to write, since the compiler writes them implicitly for you

In a recent thread on Twitter, I had mentioned about a comment that Manuel Chakravarty made in one of the blog posts of Micheal Feathers ..
"Of course, strong type checking cannot replace a rigorous testing discipline, but it makes you more confident to take bigger steps."

The statement resonated my own feelings on static typing that I have been practising for quite some time now using Scala. Since the twitter thread became louder, Patrick Logan made an interesting comment in my blog on this very subject ..

This is interesting... it is a long way toward the kind of explanation I have been looking for re: "type-driven programming" with rich type systems as opposed to "test-driven programming" with dynamic languages.

I am still a big fan of the latter and do not fully comprehend the former.

I'd be interested in your "type development" process - without "tests" of some kind, the type system may validate the "type soundness" of your types, but how do you know they are the types you actually *want* to have proven sound?

and the conversation became somewhat longer where both of us were trying to look into the practices and subtleties that domain modeling with type constraints imply on the programmer. One of the points that Patrick raised was regarding the kind of tests that you would typically provide for a code like this.

Let me try to look into some of the real life coding that I have been using this practice on. When I have a code snippet like this ..

/**
 * A trade needs to have a Trading Account
 */
trait Trade {
  type T
  val account: T
  def valueOf: Unit
}

/**
 * An equity trade needs to have a Stock as the instrument
 */
trait EquityTrade extends Trade {
  override def valueOf {
    //.. calculate value
  }
}

/**
 * A fixed income trade needs to have a FixedIncome type of instrument
 */
trait FixedIncomeTrade extends Trade {
  override def valueOf {
    //.. calculate value
  }
}
//..
//..

/**
 * Accrued Interest is computed only for fixed income trades
 */
trait AccruedInterestCalculatorComponent {
  type T

  val acc: AccruedInterestCalculator
  trait AccruedInterestCalculator {
    def calculate(trade: T)
  }
}

I need to do validations and write up unit and functional tests to check ..

• EquityTrade needs to work only on equity class of instruments


• FixedIncomeTrade needs to work on fixed incomes only and not on any other instruments


• For every method in the domain model that takes an instrument or trade, I need to check if the passed in instrument or trade is of the proper type and as well write unit tests that check the same. AccruedInterestCalculator takes a trade as an argument, which needs to be of type FixedIncomeTrade, since accrued interest is only meaningful for bond trades only. The method AccruedInterestCalculator#calculate() needs to do an explicit check for the trade type which makes me write unit tests as well for valid as well as invalid use cases.

Now let us introduce the type constraints that a statically typed language with a powerful type system offers.

trait Trade {
  type T <: Trading
  val account: T

  //..as above
}

trait EquityTrade extends Trade {
  type S <: Stock
  val equity: S

  //.. as above
}

trait FixedIncomeTrade extends Trade {
  type FI <: FixedIncome
  val fi: FI

  //.. as above
}
//..

The moment we add these type constraints our domain model becomes more expressive and implicitly constrained with a lot of business rules .. as for example ..

1. A Trade takes place on a Trading account only


2. An EquityTrade only deals with Stocks, while a FixedIncomeTrade deals exclusively with FixedIncome type of instruments

Consider this more expressive example that slaps the domain constraints right in front of you without them being buried within procedural code logic in the form of runtime checks. Note that in the following example, all the types and vals that were left abstract earlier are being instantiated while defining the concrete component. And you can only instantiate honoring the domain rules that you have defined earlier. How useful is that as a succinct way to write concise domain logic without having to write any unit test ?

object FixedIncomeTradeComponentRegistry extends TradingServiceComponentImpl
  with AccruedInterestCalculatorComponentImpl
  with TaxRuleComponentImpl {

  type T = FixedIncomeTrade
  val tax = new TaxRuleServiceImpl
  val trd = new TradingServiceImpl
  val acc = new AccruedInterestCalculatorImpl
}

Every wiring that you do above is statically checked for consistency - hence the FixedIncome component that you build will honor all the domain rules that you have stitched into it through explicit type constraints.

The good part is that these business rules will be enforced by the compiler itself, without me having to write any additional explicit check in the code base. And the compiler is also the testing tool - you will not be able to instantiate a FixedIncomeTrade with an instrument that is not a subtype of FixedIncome.

Then how do we test such type constrained domain abstractions ?

Rule #1: Type constraints are tested by the compiler. You cannot instantiate an inconsistent component that violates the constraints that you have incorporated in your domain abstractions.

Rule #2: You need to write tests for the business logic only that form the procedural part of your abstractions. Obviously! Types cannot be of much help there. But if you are using a statically typed language, get the maximum out of the abstractions that the type system offers. There are situations when you will discover repetitive procedural business logic with minor variations sprinkled across the code base. If you are working with a statically typed language, model them up into a type family. Your tests for that logic will be localized *only* within the type itself. This is true for dynamically typed languages as well. Where static typing gets the advantage is that all usages will be statically checked by the compiler. In a statically typed language, you think and model in "types". In a dynamically typed languages you think in terms of the messages that the abstrcation needs to handle.

Rule #3: But you need to create instances of your abstractions within the tests. How do you do that ? Very soon you will notice that the bulk of your tests are being polluted by complicated instantiations using concrete val or type injection. What I do usually is to use the generators that ScalaCheck offers. ScalaCheck offers a special generator, org.scalacheck.Arbitrary.arbitrary, which generates arbitrary values of any supported type. And once you have the generators in place, you can use them to write properties that do the necessary testing of the rest of your domain logic.

From http://debasishg.blogspot.com/