A Java geek

What is unit testing anyway?

If you’re in contact with Java development, as a developer, an architect or a project manager, you can’t have heard of unit testing, as every quality method enforces its use. From Wikipedia:

“Unit testing is a test (often automated) that validates that individual units of source code are working properly. A unit is the smallest testable part of an application. In procedural programming a unit may be an individual program, function, procedure, etc., while in object-oriented programming, the smallest unit is a method, which may belong to a base/super class, abstract class or derived/child class. Ideally, each test case is independent from the others.”

Unit tests have much added value, apart from validating the working of your classes. If you have to change classes that you didn’t develop yourself, you should be glad to have them… because if they fail, it would instantly alert you of a failure: you won’t discover the nasty NullPointerException you just coded in production!

Before the coming of testing frameworks (more later), the usual testing was done: Read more…