Why Is Unit Testing So Important for Developers?

In this article, we will try to see why unit testing is considered so important that no programmer in the world can imagine the debugging process without it!

So, unit testing is a very powerful web tool for improving the quality of developed software. Only the use of unit tests allows to perform fundamental testing and ensuring that the developed software exactly meets the specification and its behavior is as was originally programmed.

Benefits of Unit Tests

If everything is good, unit tests can:

1. Reduce the number of bugs and find them early in the software lifecycle;
2. Increase the overall readability of the software code;
3. Allow code reuse;
4. Increase the speed of web infrastructure deployment.

Further, we will talk about the importance of unit testing, how this type of software testing came about, and what are the current obstacles to its widespread implementation among a wide range of software testing companies.

A Brief History of the Development of Unit Testing

A defect found in the early stages of testing is a significant saving in time and mental effort. Over the last 50-60 years of computer history, unit testing has been connetced with debugging in one way or another.

But by the mid-1990s, program code had become so complex that it sometimes became extremely difficult to divide the system into smaller parts to start them in isolation. In 1997, Kent Beck developed JUnit, a special development plugin for testing small pieces of program code.

The test program code that analyzes the source code of the product is called unit tests. This kind of unit testing became a pattern for many years to come.

An Illustrative Example of Unit Testing

The following example of unit testing eloquently describes its importance and necessity in today’s realities of software testing methodologies.

Here JUnit is a parameter that can convert temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius.

# is (input, expected result, comment)
is( FtoC(32),0,’Freezing point is F32, C 0′);
is( FtoC(212),100,’Boiling point is F212, C 100′);
is( FtoC(59038),32767, ‘Upper limit of C is 32767’);
is( FtoC(59039),undefined, ‘One past upper limit is error’);

Increased Speed, Testability, and Quality of Tests

Some product company executives say that any planning involves some kind of trade-off between product quality, the amount of work done, time, and technical resources. To add something in area X, you have to take something away from area Y.

Productive modular checks break these rules in the bud! And that’s why modular checks are important and valuable for product companies. Quality unit tests allow you to develop well-tested code that improves the overall structure of the web product. When bugs appear in the software, unit tests speed up the process of debugging, nuanced editing, and creating program code. And it’s all done in such a way that the possibility of a bug reoccurring is reduced, but, at the same time, the quality of the code and the speed of writing it are improved.

In Conclusion

While there are no magic methods in the software testing environment to overcome problems that arise, quality unit tests can significantly speed up the basics of development, verification, and even some of the work on functional requirements.