88Pro Thinking

I can’t believe that there still are people out there who don’t understand the concept of Unit Testing. When I ran a search on Google I realized that I am not alone on this boat. Guys who wrote books on Unit Testing, themselves, feel developers don’t understand what unit testing is all about. Even now I hear arguments similar to the statement that Unit Testing is the same as testing the methods by passing some values manually. Developers still don’t realize the benefits of writing unit tests, one common argument being, that unit testing is going to take time to code and developers could utilize that time to code another feature into the application.

The main reason for this resistance towards unit testing stems from lack of understanding. Many have just heard the buzz word unit testing, and they know its writing code to test the application code automatically, and that’s about it. In this perspective, it really seems a waste of time to write unit tests when one can just test the procedures and methods manually as they write them. If you are in this category, please make sure you understand what Unit Testing is all about, and what the advantages of unit testing are. A good starting point would be this PDF (What is Unit Testing) from Pragmatic Programmers which is the first chapter from their book on Unit Testing.

posted by 88Pro / Tuesday, May 18, 2004