What is Unit Testing and Best Practices of Unit Testing

Unit testing doesn’t care about Black Box testers. Their primary objective is to validate the application against the specifications without going into the details of the implementation. But as an interest or thought out of the box, have you ever considered how their code is checked by developers? Until they release code for testing, what form do they use to test? In an agile process, how is dev-testing relevant? To all this, the solution is Unit Testing. We want to educate you on the value of Unit Testing so that teams can work more collaboratively to design, evaluate, and release an outstanding application for production and testing.

What Is Unit Testing?

A modern design is not Unit Testing. Since the early days of programming, it has been there. Typically, developers and often white box testers write unit tests to improve code quality by testing each code unit used to enforce functional specifications (aka test drove development TDD or test-first development). Most of us can know the meaning:

“The method of testing the smallest piece of testable code against its purpose is unit testing.” If the purpose or requirement failed, the unit test failed. It means writing a piece of code (unit test) to validate the code (unit) written for implementation specifications in simple words.

Unit Testing In SDLC

Developers use manual or automated checks in unit testing to ensure that each unit in the program meets the specifications of the client. In a software under evaluation, this unit may be an individual function, entity, process, procedure, or module. As all the units are grouped, writing unit tests to assess the individual units makes it easier to write detailed tests. It is done as the first stage of testing during software development.

Importance of Unit Testing

Unit Testing is used to develop robust elements of software that help preserve code and eliminate code unit problems. In the early phase of the software development cycle, we all know the value of identifying and repairing defects. The same goal is achieved by this testing.

It is an important part of the development process of agile applications. It is important to run and report when a nightly build run unit test suite should be produced. The QA team does not approve the construction for verification if any of the unit tests have failed. If we set this as a standard method, many bugs in the early development stage will be caught, saving a lot of testing time. Due to tight scheduling or lack of seriousness, they either ignore or write poor unit test cases. A writing good unit test, or not writing them at all, is critical. Providing adequate time and a welcoming atmosphere for real benefits is even more critical.

Unit Testing Methods

It can be conducted in 2 ways:

• Manual testing
• Automated testing

In Manual Testing, without using any automation tool, the tester manually performs test cases. Each stage of the test is manually performed here. Particularly for repetitive tests, manual testing is tedious and needs more effort to build and execute test cases. No knowledge of any testing tool is needed for Manual Testing.

It is a fact that 100% of automation is not feasible and so some amount of manual testing will always be done. In Automated Testing, automation tools for software testing are used to automate test/test scenarios. Without any further human interaction, the automation tool will record and save your test and it can be replayed as many times as needed. These tools can also enter test data into the device being tested, as well as compare the results predicted to the actual results, and produce the reports automatically. The actual cost of setting up test automation instruments is high, however.

Also Read: Why is Unit Testing Important in Software Testing?

Techniques within Unit Testing

Various techniques are given below within unit testing:

• White Box Testing

The tester knows the internal layout of the program, including the code, in white-box testing and can test it against the specification and the specifications. Thus, white box testing is often referred to as clear testing.

• Black Box Testing

The tester does not know either the internal mechanisms or the code of the program during black-box testing.

Benefits of Unit Testing

Various benefits of unit testing are given below:

• The method is agile: we need to make adjustments to the old code to introduce new functionality or features to the current program. But it can be dangerous as well as expensive to change stuff to the already checked code.
• Code quality improves: As unit testing is conducted, code quality is immediately improved. Before it is submitted to the integration testing level, the bugs found during this testing are patched. As developers write test cases by knowing the requirements first, the result is stable design and development.
• Early identification of bugs: As developers run unit tests, they find and fix bugs early in the life cycle of software development. This entails errors or incomplete sections in the specification as well as bugs in the implementation of the programmer.
• Easier improvements and easier integrations: It is easier for the developer to restructure the code, make changes, and manage the code by doing unit testing. It also makes it much easier to evaluate the code after integration. Fixing an issue in Unit Testing will fix several other problems that arise in later stages of development and testing.
• Availability of documentation: Developers who look at the features at a later point will refer to the documentation of the unit testing and can easily locate and correct the unit test interface or work quickly and easily.

When it is appropriate to measure each feature separately, unit testing comes into the picture. Instead of finding out at the later stage of software development, it is very fair to identify and correct bugs during this testing and save time and cost. Although it has many benefits, there are also drawbacks associated with using it. Throughout the software development process, rigorous discipline and consistency are needed to overcome drawbacks and achieve the expected benefits.

Also Read: How to perform Unit testing with xUnit?