Today I will be talking about a blog called “Unit Testing, How to Write Testable Code and Why it Matters”. This blog talks about the importance of unit testing for anyone who is a software developer. The blog talks about what unit testing is, what it consists of, and something that I had never heard of until today; the three A’s of unit testing: Arrange, Act, Assert. We will talk about these three A’s of unit testing in more detail later. Another thing the blog talks about is unit testing vs integration testing. The blog sums up the difference between the two as unit tests have a narrow scope to test just one small part of the program whereas integration tests test how the “pieces” of code fit together and work hand in hand. Essentially, integration testing is a larger scale version of unit testing. So what exactly makes a good unit test? According to the blog, good unit tests consist of tests that are easy to write, readable, reliable, fast, and truly unit testing (not integration testing). This is where the three A’s of unit testing come into play. After you make sure that your unit tests adhere to the rules of good unit testing, you can apply the three A’s of unit testing. The three A’s (as mentioned before) are Arrange, Act, and Assert. Firstly, we arrange. We do this by testing small portions of the code (unit tests) to ensure they work as designed. Next we give the test some sort of input to “test” its function to make sure it works correctly, this is also known as the Act phase. Lastly, we Assert what we know our output should be and we then compare it to the output of the function we are testing.
I think this is an extremely important article because it has given me a lot of insight on how to make good unit tests and how to make the testing cycle easier by remembering the three A’s of unit testing; Arrange, Act, Assert. I hope to use the three A’s of unit testing in my future programs in hopes that my testing will go smoothly and quickly. Another thing the article talked about that cleared up some confusion for me is unit testing versus integration testing. For me, the two have always been kind of interchanged and intermingled, as they are very closely related. I think that many people know there is a difference between the two, but do not know exactly what that difference is. It is good to think of it as integration tests being larger scale unit tests. In my head, I now think of integration tests as being made up of smaller unit tests, and seeing how those unit tests work together. I think this article was overall a really good read and will make my approach to writing tests for my programs change for the better.
Here’s The Link: https://www.toptal.com/qa/how-to-write-testable-code-and-why-it-matters
From the blog CS@Worcester – The Average CS Student by Nathan Posterro and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.