Is a class that is hard to unit test badly designed?

Posted by Extrakun on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Extrakun
Published on 2010-04-17T15:20:37Z Indexed on 2010/04/17 15:23 UTC
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I am now doing unit testing on an application which was written over the year, before I started to do unit-testing diligently. I realized that the classes I wrote are hard to unit test, for the following reasons:

  1. Relies on loading data from database. Which means I have to setup a row in the table just to run the unit test (and I am not testing database capabilities).
  2. Requires a lot of other external classes just to get the class I am testing to its initial state.

On the whole, there don't seem to be anything wrong with the design except that it is too tightly coupled (which by itself is a bad thing). I figure that if I have written automated test cases with each of the class, hence ensuring that I don't heap extra dependencies or coupling for the class to work, the class might be better designed.

Does this reason holds water? What are your experiences?

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