Unit Testing is an essential software development procedure that is vital to guarantee the quality and dependability of software solutions. It entails testing separate software program units or components one at a time to ensure that everyone performs as intended. Even though unit testing is a generally accepted practice, there are still questions in the software development world about who does it and why it’s important.
Prerequisites
Who Performs Unit Testing?
1. Developer
Developers are the ones who are responsible for unit testing to determine if the particular method or function works or not.
- With unit testing, we can identify issues with the specific method or function and develop the respective features accordingly.
- Regarding Unit testing, the developer has a huge responsibility because they are the ones who are taking the first step towards a better quality of an application, also it is like a self-review tool for them before pushing it for code review and deployment to the test environment.
Benefits of Developers Testing Their Code
- This leads to a better understanding of code design because when they write tests, they think about design in smaller testable chunks.
- Speeds up the debugging process by detecting errors or bugs at a very early stage of development.
- Saves time and effort.
- Helps to fix the bugs immediately based on the feedback. (That means unlimited chance of refactoring).
2. QA Engineers
Unit testing is essentially a White Box Testing technique, meaning we perform testing where we know the software works internally but only white box testing is not sufficient that’s why QA (Quality Assurance) comes into the picture.
- The role of QA engineers is to find bugs in the software that unit testing did not find. This is because QA engineers have a different view as compared to developers.
- They use black-box testing instead of white-box to verify the application’s functionality. But when unit testing is done properly before the QA engineers start their work, it brings a huge benefit to software projects. In short, the QA engineers build on the foundation that developers have laid out.
Why Unit Testing is Necessary?
The necessity of Unit Testing primarily depends on improving the organization’s efficiency and effectiveness, therefore both Developers and QA Engineers play a vital role in this process.
Now, here are some points that explain why Unit Testing is necessary:
1. Early Bug Detection
Bugs are nothing but the errors found during the unit testing. Unit testing helps to detect the bugs at the very early stage of development and helps to understand better the quality of the software. That’s why unit tests are important to understand the different perspectives about code design.
2. Provide Refactoring
Unit testing plays a vital role in safety measures for the developers. These safety measures act as a protective net and guarantee that the code remains functional even after the changes. With the help of this and by defining the expected behaviors we can identify the potential changes that may affect our code’s effectiveness.
3. Improves Code Quality
Developers create unit tests for the functions and methods that they have created to ensure that these functions or methods work accordingly to coding standards. That’s why unit testing helps to maintain the code quality and consistency of code.
4. Documentation and Specification
During unit testing, it is very crucial to create a document about each unit test. This helps to ensure the code’s accuracy and clarity. Essentially, it serves as a manual for the code, promoting efficient and effective development practices. It is useful for those who do not know the particular part of the code for which the documentation is prepared.
5. Test Automation and Continuous Integration (CI)
We can view Test Automation as an extension of Continuous Integration (CI). CI requires programmers to integrate code into the main branch of the source code repository at least once every 24 hours along with that CI also requires automated testing, so for that developers have to write unit tests for new features. and if they don’t then it will be difficult for them to debug the problems related to their code. That’s why CI along with automation testing reduces the number of bugs in the software by ensuring that all changes are tested before deployed on a live system.
6. Test Driven Development (TDD)
Test Driven Development is typically a method to increase code coverage unit through unit testing. TDD is nothing but the testing process where developers write a unit test case before writing the actual code. This approach helps to define how a unit test should be used and after implementing it, developers can make changes until all expected results occur.
Conclusion:
In today’s digital era number of complex software systems is increasing, therefore relying solely on QA Engineers for testing is not sufficient. It is necessary to involve multiple teams across the organization in the testing process to achieve optimal results. That’s why the engagement of developers, QA engineers, and other stakeholders in testing enhances the quality of software by identifying the defects or bugs in the early stages of testing and by evolving the user needs accordingly.