11 Facts About Unit testing

Unit testing tests are typically automated tests written and run by software developers to ensure that a section of an application meets its design and behaves as intended.

Goal of unit testing is to isolate each part of the program and show that the individual parts are correct.

Unit testing provides a sort of living documentation of the system.

Unit testing should be done in conjunction with other software testing activities, as they can only show the presence or absence of particular errors; they cannot prove a complete absence of errors.

Unit testing embedded system software presents a unique challenge: Because the software is being developed on a different platform than the one it will eventually run on, you cannot readily run a test program in the actual deployment environment, as is possible with desktop programs.

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Unit testing tests tend to be easiest when a method has input parameters and some output.

Unit testing is the cornerstone of extreme programming, which relies on an automated unit testing framework.

Extreme programming simply recognizes that Unit testing is rarely exhaustive and provides guidance on how to effectively focus limited resources.

Extreme programming's thorough unit testing allows the benefits mentioned above, such as simpler and more confident code development and refactoring, simplified code integration, accurate documentation, and more modular designs.

Unit testing frameworks are most often third-party products that are not distributed as part of the compiler suite.

Unit testing without a framework is valuable in that there is a barrier to entry for the adoption of unit testing; having scant unit tests is hardly better than having none at all, whereas once a framework is in place, adding unit tests becomes relatively easy.