I received the following paragraph in an Email of the Typemock newsletter:
Eli Lopian, CEO of Typemock, laid out his thoughts on the necessity of unit testing in software development: "Any software programmer that does not do unit testing is a reckless coder," declared Lopian. "Unit testing is an essential part of any software development process. It allows you to deliver working code, with fewer bugs, faster. Typemock has made huge advances with its automated unit testing tools in the past 8 years… Old arguments that unit testing is too hard no longer apply!"
Anyone who has followed me for a few weeks will know I am convinced of the overwhelming power of unit testing. I have not brought myself to the degree of confidence in a statement as dogmatic as the one made by Eli. That is only because he stated “Any programmer.” I have met two programmers in the last 30 years who were able to write flawless code effortlessly. I am not one of those flawless programmers. I have met thousands of programmers who do not write flawless code.
I would go on record stating unit testing adds great value regardless of your software development lifecycle. Even with a waterfall SDLC, unit testing saves time and effort.
The statistics prove the earlier in your software cycle a bug is identified and fixed, the lower the cost of rectifying that bug. This has proven true in both agile and waterfall processes. When a developer finds a bug they fix it immediately; at least before passing it on to the next phase. When a QA person finds a bug, it gets pushed back to development to be fixed, but the cost of fixing the bug has also increased. When acceptance testing, or system testing identifies a bug, the cost increases even more. Bugs found in production are the most disruptive and expensive bugs to fix.
Are you using unit testing? Are you interested in using Unit tests, but have roadblocks keeping you from moving forward? Having used unit testing, would you consider coding without them?
Get into the conversation by leaving a comment below, or drop me an Email at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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