Automated Unit Testing; it works…

I shouldn’t sound so surprised! Previously I have been a casual proponent of Unit Testing in an automated sense, in that I knew it was a good idea, but often did not implement as thoroughly as I should. I was fan, but not quite a convert – this has since changed.

On the current project I am managing I decided that automated Unit Testing (using NUnit) was to be a first class deliverable within the development phase due to the complexity of the solution. I have since personally discovered that bugs are often discovered during the construction of the Unit Tests due to extra thought involved in attempting to test the various logic paths, so these are often corrected before the tests are even executed or constructed – nice outcome! Then of course, there is the constant execution of the tests to verify that new code changes have not since broken existing functions – I am pleasantly surprised at the number of times little errors have been picked up quickly and early – very nice :-)

I am now a *real* believer!