Unit testing is a crucial aspect of software development that focuses on testing individual components of a software product. Nickolay Bakharev writes a great article detailing the uses, advantages, and strategies to unit testing in his article, Unit Testing: Definition, Examples, and Critical Best Practices.
Unit testing involves writing tests for functions, procedures, methods, objects, or other entities in an application’s source code. The goal is to ensure that each unit of the software performs as intended and meets requirements.
Some advantages of unit testing are that it is able to detect problems early, thereby reducing costs. It is also heavily test-driven, easier to refactor the code, and allows developers to keep documentation of the system’s behavior.
Unit tests usually consist of four phases:
1. Planning and setting up the environment
2. Writing test cases and scripts
3. Executing the tests
4. Analyzing the results
A common approach to unit testing is something called Test-driven development (TDD), where tests are written before the actual code, resulting in a high-quality, consistent codebase.
Unit testing can also be used for security purposes by creating tests that focus on the security controls of the smallest testable unit of software. Security unit tests can help catch security flaws early in the development lifecycle which saves the costs of potential security breaches.
Various unit testing techniques include structural unit testing, which examines the internal structure of the code, functional unit testing, which tests the functionality of an application component, and error-based techniques such as fault seeding and mutation testing.
There are many examples of unit testing in specific frameworks. Some include Android unit testing, Angular unit testing, Node.js unit testing using Mocha, and React Native unit testing using Jest.
In order to use unit testing most effectively, the developer must write readable tests, write deterministic tests that always pass or fail on the same code, automate unit tests in a continuous integration process, and avoid multiple asserts in a single unit test to maintain clarity and reliability.
I found unit testing to be a very useful technique to learn in class. While I knew the basics of testing, this was the first time I actually implemented it into code. I will try to add these unit testing techniques to my research project code.
From the blog Stories by Namson Nguyen on Medium by Namson Nguyen and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.