Do polymorphism or conditionals promote better design?

Question

I recently stumbled across this entry in the google testing blog about guidelines for writing more testable code. I was in agreement with the author until this point:

Favor polymorphism over conditionals: If you see a switch statement you should think polymorphisms. If you see the same if condition repeated in many places in your class you should again think polymorphism. Polymorphism will break your complex class into several smaller simpler classes which clearly define which pieces of the code are related and execute together. This helps testing since simpler/smaller class is easier to test.

I simply cannot wrap my head around that. I can understand using polymorphism instead of RTTI (or DIY-RTTI, as the case may be), but that seems like such a broad statement that I can't imagine it actually being used effectively in production code. It seems to me, rather, that it would be easier to add additional test cases for methods which have switch statements, rather than breaking down the code into dozens of separate classes.

Also, I was under the impression that polymorphism can lead to all sorts of other subtle bugs and design issues, so I'm curious to know if the tradeoff here would be worth it. Can someone explain to me exactly what is meant by this testing guideline?

Answer 1

Actually this makes testing and code easier to write.

If you have one switch statement based on an internal field you probably have the same switch in multiple places doing slightly different things. This causes problems when you add a new case as you have to update all the switch statements (if you can find them).

By using polymorphism you can use virtual functions to get the same functionality and because a new case is a new class you don't have to search your code for things that need to be checked it is all isolated for each class.

class Animal
{
    public:
       Noise warningNoise();
       Noise pleasureNoise();
    private:
       AnimalType type;
};

Noise Animal::warningNoise()
{
    switch(type)
    {
        case Cat: return Hiss;
        case Dog: return Bark;
    }
}
Noise Animal::pleasureNoise()
{
    switch(type)
    {
        case Cat: return Purr;
        case Dog: return Bark;
    }
}

In this simple case every new animal causes requires both switch statements to be updated.
You forget one? What is the default? BANG!!

Using polymorphism

class Animal
{
    public:
       virtual Noise warningNoise() = 0;
       virtual Noise pleasureNoise() = 0;
};

class Cat: public Animal
{
   // Compiler forces you to define both method.
   // Otherwise you can't have a Cat object

   // All code local to the cat belongs to the cat.

};

By using polymorphism you can test the Animal class.
Then test each of the derived classes separately.

Also this allows you to ship the Animal class (Closed for alteration) as part of you binary library. But people can still add new Animals (Open for extension) by deriving new classes derived from the Animal header. If all this functionality had been captured inside the Animal class then all animals need to be defined before shipping (Closed/Closed).