Unit Testing Benefits

Introduction to Unit Testing Benefits

Unit Testing benefits provide numerous advantages including finding the software bugs at an earlier stage, facilitate the required changes, simplify integration, and provide documentation source. In Programming, unit testing is a major part of Software testing methodology in which individual sources of code i.e., in the form of units are tested whether the application is fit for use or not. Unit is the smallest component of an application that can be tested. Unit testing is a type of functional testing and action performed on smallest unit produces some result which is independent of each other. Failures in these unit testing shows which part of the code is not functioning as required.

Benefits of Unit Testing

Benefits of unit testing are given below:

• Code Quality: Unit Testing the software applications improvises the code quality and identify each defect and also determine the smallest defect that may come up before hand, even before code is sent for integration testing. Framing test suites or test cases even before the actual coding makes the tester think harder on the problem. Here, edge cases are exposed which helps developer to develop the code in a better way. Performing unit test is essentially having quality assurance of the code.
• Agile Process: It is one of the important features is that Unit testing makes coding process more of Agile way. When user adds more features to the software, they might need to make changes to old code or the design, which is expensive and risky. In such cases, if user follows the unit testing, it saves lot of time and makes complete process faster and easier.
• Software Bugs: Unit testing will help in identifying all type of issues with the software application at an early stage and hence software developers can first work on the ongoing issues and then continue further without any impact on other part of the code and issue being resolved at an early stage. It leads to increase in efficiency, cost, and downtime reduction else the whole design process will be stalled.
• Facilitates Change and Integration Simplifies: Unit testing allows developer for code refactoring or for upgrading system libraries later and gets sure about the module working as required. Unit testing may break a design and hence help with code maintenance. It reduces defects in new features developed and reduces bugs too for existing functionality.

Unit testing also verifies the accuracy of each small unit. After which, the units are integrated into the application by testing units of application via unit testing. Finally, testing application at the time of integration will be easier as individual units are tested.

• Debugging Process: Unit testing will help in simplifying debugging process to a great extent. If there is a test failure, then only the latest changes made in code need to be tested or debugged.
• Provides Documentation: Unit testing of the software applications provides documentation of system. Developers who would want to learn on the functionality or a certain program or an application can learn easily with the provided documentation for each module individually. It will help develop a thorough understanding of system and what each individual module does.
• Design: Having the unit test cases in first place, it makes user to think through the design and what is the first to accomplish before writing code. It will help them to stay focused and help to create much better designs. Testing piece of code forces to determine what a particular code is determined for. If this is done, it means code is well defined and hence has high cohesion.
• Reduce Cost: In unit testing, bugs are found at an early stage and hence helps in cost reduction i.e., cost of bug fixing is reduced significantly. If such bugs are discovered at a later stage, fixing of such bugs would be much more expensive. When bugs get detected at later stage, they usually are due to many other changes done to the system already. If software is already developed, finding out the exact unit of code will be major problem.

Some of the other benefits of Unit testing are,

• Unit testing will reduce defects in newly developed requirements and reduce bugs while changing the existing functionality.
• Unit testing will reduce cost as defects are captured at an early stage.
• It improves design and allows better code refactoring.
• Unit testing when integrated with build gives build quality as well.
• It helps is validating accuracy of unit code by considering mock objects, stubs, drivers, and other unit testing framework.
• Some of the developers perform minimal unit testing and when some part of unit testing is skipped, it leads to high cost for defect fix at integration testing, system testing and also during beta testing.
• It makes better code and designing independent of the programming language used.

Conclusion

With this we shall conclude the topic ‘Unit Testing Benefits’. We have seen what unit testing is and what are all the benefits. Unit testing gives bunch of benefits, saves company’s money, makes customers happier, give confidence while refactoring and helps to understand code in a better way. We also find that testing makes users to focus on what needs to be done for frequent releases and help users with more of legacy code. Thanks! Happy Learning!!

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Unit Testing Benefits. Here we also discuss the introduction and benefits of unit testing along with an explanation. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –

1. Unit Testing vs System Testing
2. Unit Testing Tools
3. Unit Testing
4. System Testing