Articles

Why so few organizations maintain unit tests for their in-house applications? This article discusses the two assertions that unit testing saves money by discovering bugs earlier and that it reduces the number of bug in the application. Despites the provocative title, the article provides some evidence that unit testing can play a critical role to help delivering applications. Its  goal is to challenge the premise that writing unit tests is always a wise practice in all contexts. The conclusion is that you can not rely on a general acceptance of the myth that unit testing is a universal panacea, but you need to focus unit testing on aspects of development where it is most effective and be prepared to actively justify its use.

eXtreme programming is an Agile software development methodologies. It involves extremely short incremental release cycles, early and frequent testing, heavy use of design refactoring, and pair programming. This article proposes a process model called “ordered incremental testing” where guidance on test order is provided. Testing is conducted iteratively with very short iteration cycles as a single class is developed. Although early and frequent testing is very important, there is little guidance about specifics of the testing process.