Making a private method public to unit test it…good idea?

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Note:
This answer was originally posted for the question Is unit testing alone ever a good reason to expose private instance variables via getters? which was merged into this one, so it may be a tad specific to the usecase presented there.

As a general statement, I’m usually all for refactoring “production” code to make it easier to test. However, I don’t think that would be a good call here. A good unit test (usually) shouldn’t care about the class’ implementation details, only about its visible behavior. Instead of exposing the internal stacks to the test, you could test that the class returns the pages in the order you expect it to after calling first() or last().

For example, consider this pseudo-code:

public class NavigationTest {
    private Navigation nav;

    @Before
    public void setUp() {
        // Set up nav so the order is page1->page2->page3 and
        // we've moved back to page2
        nav = ...;
    }

    @Test
    public void testFirst() {
        nav.first();

        assertEquals("page1", nav.getPage());

        nav.next();
        assertEquals("page2", nav.getPage());

        nav.next();
        assertEquals("page3", nav.getPage());
    }

    @Test
    public void testLast() {
        nav.last();

        assertEquals("page3", nav.getPage());

        nav.previous();
        assertEquals("page2", nav.getPage());

        nav.previous();
        assertEquals("page1", nav.getPage());
    }
}

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