Unit Testing – Necessary but not Sufficient

Posted in blog city on July 12th 2004 

Mike Spille wrote his opinions on unit testing and JUnit in his recent blogs. Read some of them here and here. As is the case with any post, there are many points I agree and quite a few that I disagree. As a disclaimer, I am not a die hard follower of XP/TDD as I believe they are just some common sense ideas documented in detail.

JUnit has certainly changed the way developers look at unit testing. At the least, it has made unit testing poplular. Yes, it will not solve all other problems of integration testing, performance testing, MT testing etc. — but still it does help in unit testing.

As I see this is very important. Unit Testing is an necessary but not sufficient testing for any useful peice of software. We cannot think of next level of testing without unit testing. And when you have a complex project where multiple developers across geographies are involved, it becomes all more important to have unit test cases that follow some kind of framework, which is where JUnit fits in, rather neatly.