Getting Started with Unit Testing
by Tariq Ahmed
You wake up in the morning, anxious to get into work. Yesterday you completed your coding and now you’re ready to enter the most exciting part of software development: the Quality Assurance or QA cycle. Nothing could be more satisfying than to run some tests — just to go through the motions — and demonstrate the perfection of your superior code!
Okay, that reality obviously does not exist. Developers hate testing — it bores us, and a part of us wants to hope that everything will pretty much work. So if we could just throw it over the wall to the QA team and move onto the next thing, that would be just swell.
Unfortunately, any bugs in your code will come back to haunt you. More importantly from a business perspective, a bug released to production costs more than one caught earlier in the product lifecycle.
Those costs can include:
- Reduced sales from customers who lose confidence in the product.
- Support staff time spent identifying, verifying, and reproducing the bug.
- The need to repair corrupted data.
- Impact to the time available for other projects that go on hold to make time for you to fix the bug.
In this article we will take a look at the benefits of testing and of unit testing in particular, as well as at FlexUnit and fluint, two tools that automate that process.
Read more of this article in Flex Authority Volume 2 Issue 1!