What Are The Factors That Make A Good Unit Test?

Unit testing is one of the important types of software testing. Developers are responsible for writing good unit tests. It is considered to be quite complex, but, in actuality, it is easy to write and run. 

The only thing required is to understand what actually is the role of performing the unit test in the software development process and what can be expected out of it. In this article, you will know about the five important factors that make a good unit test.

What is unit testing?

It is a testing method, where the smallest pieces of code known as units are tested. A unit can be method, class, function, subroutine, etc. The modern versions of unit testing can be found in testing tools like TestComplete or frameworks like JUnit. The correctness of isolated code is tested through unit testing.

Following are the five important factors of a good unit test:

1. Easy to write: A lot of unit tests are written by developers to cover aspects of the application’s behavior and different test cases. So, all of those test routines should be easy to code without enormous effort.

2. Fast-paced: Unit tests are written by developers so that they can repeatedly run them and also check whether any new bugs have been introduced or not. 

If the unit tests are slow in performance, then it is more likely that developers will skip running them on their own machines. It wouldn’t matter if there is one slow unit test, but, if a thousand more slow tests are added, then surely the overall performance will be affected. 

Slow unit tests also indicate that either the test itself or the system under test interacts with external systems thus making it environment-dependent.

3. Reliable: If there is a bug that has been identified in the system under test, only then should a unit test fail. Programmers do get tensed, especially when there are no bugs that have been found, but, still, the tests fail. 

A simple example would be when tests are run one-by-one and so they might pass, but, when it comes to running the whole test suite, tests may fail. In certain scenarios, it may pass on the development machines, but, fail on the continuous integration server.Good unit tests should be independent and reproducible from external factors such as the environment.

4. Readable: Unit test’s intent should be clear. A good unit test projects a behavioral aspect of an application, so, which scenario is being tested should be easy to understand. If suppose, the test fails then it should be easy to detect as to how the problem should be resolved. A good unit test ensures that there is no need of debugging a code to fix a bug.

5. Absence of integration: Though there is quite some confusion between unit testing and integration testing, the fact of the matter is that both integration tests and unit tests have different purposes. Both the system under test and unit test should not access the database, file system, network resources etc., to eliminate the external factors that have been influenced.                                        

Conclusion:The above mentioned five factors are required to improve the efficacy of unit tests. If you are looking forward to strategic consultation on the implementation of unit testing for your specific project, then do get connected with a leading software testing services company that has a competent and skilled team of testing experts. You will be provided with in-depth insights and a viable unit testing implementing strategy for your software development project.

About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.