Testing and development have forever been in war. It is obvious that Testing helps reduce errors and redundant tasks, but the amount of effort required to be put be each one is different and there is where the pressure to implement unit testing into the development process comes into action and actually makes more sense.
Testing helps to find out bugs and move the development of new functionalities. And unit testing validates that your functionalities work well in the best and worst of use cases.
What freedom does Unit Testing give you?
1. Reduce Time
Piled up dev and QA cycles slow down legacy systems. Codes written without detailed tests make it easier to change codes making it difficult to stick to timelines
2. Flexible
Agility comes as a difficult thing with most legacy systems. Most of the times it becomes a burden to change codes on which applications and businesses run. Properly tested codes do very little to break existing functionality.
3. Quality Assured
To ensure that development teams do not release buggy codes so that QA doesn’t come up to be expensive and heavy on the pocket, unit testing helps to avoid this exact scenario where we take prevention to be better than cure. Unit testing helps to improve performance of product
4. Documentation
Test case scenarios are much better than 1000s of lines of technical documentations. Developers need to work with code examples and snippets rather than documents which hold a lot less practical value.
5. Practical Value
Unit test gives you much needed practical visual information whether that button is giving you the kind of result its supposed to when you click on it. The best thing about unit tests is that the documentation also shows how your code is supposed to behave. It is like e reference point and standard for your teammates, that come in handy very often.
6. Scalability
Testing helps in easy change of codes because you know exactly at what point it will break the functionality. With extensive test coverage it is easier to explore new functionalities and features without fearing about introducing new bugs, you know where to roll back to. Legacy systems that have poorly tested units keep making systems more bulky to the point of breakage and it becomes utterly difficult to scale the platform.
7. Code Refactoring
Testing helps in restructuring existing code —changing the factoring— without changing its external behavior. It speeds up system without any visual changes so that you can changes the way your program is designed but with little or no effect to existing functionalities.
8. Tests actually help Programmers
Ideal scenarios are very very different than practical ones and real world issues make it difficult to deal with them. Difference in operating systems, mini and micro bugs, stupid rules often make peculiar errors which is avoidable with Unit Testing
9. Testing is way important than you think
Testing is considered to be less important when you think about development and are given to the less experienced programmers. But coming up with various test scenarios can be tough too. Testing is not ticking on a written checklist, it is not monkey job. In a lot of cases writing automated tests is harder than coding and requires experience.
Testing tends to slow you down if you are doing units testing class-by-class or methods. You need to invest good time to write some quality tests. But with time it becomes a more trusted method because you worry less about breaking existing codes while you add new functionalities.
"Imperfect tests, run frequently, are much better than perfect tests that are never written at all"
What helped to write this blog : Stackoverflow, Unit Testing
