Unit Testing

Unit testing is a concept that directly connects to computer science and our class of Software quality assurance & test. For this blog post, I chose to focus on unit testing because it’s a prevalent and practical skill that we are learning and is required in real world software development. As programs become more complicated, testing individual components becomes an important task to ensure that systems function correctly and can be safely modified after implementation.

The resource I selected is a blog post titled “Unit Test” by Martin Fowler. In this blog, Fowler explains what unit testing is, why you should care about it, and how it fits into development and coding workflows. He states that unit tests are small, automated tests that check whether individual pieces of code function correctly by themselves. The article also talks about how unit testing helps with refactoring and reduces the breaking of code.

I chose this particular resource because Martin Fowler explains the idea of unit testing and what it is in a simple and easy to understand blog. Not only that, but the blog helped me better understand that testing is not just an after thought, but a professional part of coding that improves productivity and code quality long term. The way unit testing was explained by Martin Fowler also correlates to what we are learning and working with directly in class. With the team assignments and work being unit testing and junit testing. With the reading I can hopefully better understand and work though the assignments, especially since I am currently away and will be working individually until my return.

Reading this blog helped me better understand how unit testing alters the way developers think about writing code. Instead of only focusing on whether a program works once, unit testing make you think about edge cases, expected outcome, and possible changes. Unit tests can act as documentation for how code is supposed to behave, which is helpful for context when returning to a project after a long break or when working as a team.

Hopefully in future practice, I apply unit testing by writing tests alongside my code to test individual segments to catch edge cases and unexpected input. This will likely catch errors earlier and help me with refactoring or changing my code. Eventually when I work on larger projects, unit testing will be a a massive part of the workflow that supports my code.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UnitTest.html