I would like to hear some words of wisdom from either your guys personal experience or maybe opined by by the gurus about whether or not to use random data in unit tests.
On the one hand, I understand the argument that random data makes your test irreproducible; so if something breaks the test, it make take a while to figure out exactly what and why went wrong.
On the other hand, I feel that hard-coding test data is too restrictive. For example, in the linked video, they have a 40-hour week with a 8 dollars per hour rate, and they expect the result of the calculation to equal 320. An immediate question arises, what's so special about these numbers? Would the test pass if the input were different? What about a 38-hour week and 20 dollars per hour? And so on...
On the one hand, I understand the argument that random data makes your test irreproducible; so if something breaks the test, it make take a while to figure out exactly what and why went wrong.
On the other hand, I feel that hard-coding test data is too restrictive. For example, in the linked video, they have a 40-hour week with a 8 dollars per hour rate, and they expect the result of the calculation to equal 320. An immediate question arises, what's so special about these numbers? Would the test pass if the input were different? What about a 38-hour week and 20 dollars per hour? And so on...
What's your take on this?