CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2010/ch1 1f TU

Unit Testing

A unit is the smallest building block of a software. Such a unit can be: a class, a method, an interface etc. Unit testing is the process of validating such units of code.

Benefits

Some of the benefits are:

• Proof of your code
• Better design - Thinking about the tests can help us to create small design elements, thereby improving the modularity and reusability of units.
• Safety net on bugs - Unit tests will confirm that while refactoring no additional errors were introduced.
• Be able to detect and remove defects in a more cost effective manner compared to the other stages of testing.
• Be able to test parts of a source code in isolation.
• Making debugging more efficient by searching for bugs in the probable code areas.
• Documentation - Designers can look at the unit test for a particular method and learn about its functionality.