What is Unit Testing?

What is unit testing?

In software, testing process unit testing means testing the smallest individual unit or component to validate that the smallest unit is performed as designed or not. the unit test is performed during the development or coding stage to verify its correctness, and the developers mainly perform it.

In different development methodologies like (SDLC, STLC, V Model) unit testing is the first phase of testing before doing any other testing process. Unit testing is one type of white box testing technique.

Unit testing is done by the developers during the coding to verify that the piece of written code is behaving as per the design or not. Some time by doing unit testing it helps to reduce the fixing cost during system testing, integration testing. So doing proper unit testing saves both amounts of time and investment of an organization.

Unit Testing Advantage

As unit testing is carried at a very beginning level so the issue can be found at an early stage. So that defects can fix early before impact any other piece of code.

For making unit testing, possible codes need to be modular. This means that codes are easier to reuse, and it also helps to reuse the same code in other require places, so because of this nature, the development also goes faster.

Because of unit testing, it helps to reduce the cost of bug fixes as compared to you found a bug in system testing or integration testing. You are also debugging easy because when a test fails only, you need to debug the latest changes.

By unit testing, the quality of the code is improved because it identifies the defect before the code goes for integration testing.

Unit Test Disadvantage

Unit testing can’t be expected to catch every error of a program. Because it is not possible to test all possible paths of the program. In unit testing, we are trying to find the errors from a specific unit of code. So here we can’t found integration errors or system-level errors.

Facts About the Unit Test

• Unit test cases should be independent, and it should not impact any requirement change or enhancement.
• The naming convention for each unit test case should be clear and easy to understand.
• There should be a unit test case for each module, and before implementing the change into the module, the module should pass the test.
• Bugs found during the unit test cases should be fixed before going to the next phase.
• Try to cover all paths through the unit test cases and give more attention to the loop conditions.
• Always use a version control system so that you can easily track the changes of your script.
• Perform the unit tests more frequently and continuously.

How to Write Unit Tests?

You SHould always need to write the unit tests with the code so that the developer who is working on the application can understand what is written there. For writing unit tests, there is a standard rule for that. The testing is derived from a test case and that much not dependent on other tests.

When you write the test method for every test that should start with a test, for each operation like reading, click, download, delete there should be separate methods for each.

Below you can get such a list of methods:

• setUp: this method is used to prepare the tests, so before every test, this method is called.
• tearDown: this method is called at last of test execution that is after all test methods have been called, and the respective result is stored. this method can also be called when an exception occurs.
• setUpClass: this method is called before an individual class called.
• tearDownClass: this method is called when individual methods of a class are completed
• setUpModule: this method is called before the classes of an individual module run.
• tearDownModule: this method is called after the classes of an individual module run.

By following such things, we can able to write good unit tests.

Conclusion

As you can see, there is a lot of involvement in unit testing. It can be simple or complex that depends upon which type of application you’re going to test and what testing strategy you are going to follow. But you can’t ignore the importance of unit testing in the software development process.

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