What is Unit Testing & What are Its Best Practices?

In a software development lifecycle, testing is a significant phase. It starts by inspecting every component and preparing reports of bugs. Testing comprises a set of written codes to analyze the application’s behavior. Developers can better understand the complexity & expected action & conduct of the application.

Unit testing is a process to improve the code quality before grouping the components. The Unit Testing phase permits developers to test each method, class, & other stuff.

It is considered one of the modest testing mechanisms. It lets you remove the unuseful stuff from each component and enhance the functionality systematically.

In the software Testing process, two types of practices are preferred:

• White Box testing
• Black Box testing

Black Box Testing is related to deriving things by analyzing the exterior architecture. In contrast, White Box Testing analyzes things from inner architecture. It gives us a better idea to represent the comprehensive test cases.

Why do developers conduct unit testing?

Unit testing is an effective practice to enhance the reliability, stability, consistency, and security of the software or product.

Significant outcomes of unit testing.

Rapid Testing

A large setup takes much time to figure out the bugs, but small modules take less time by frequent testing loops.

Easy Debugging

Unit testing excludes all the small false functionality from each smaller unit/ component. You can catch which components need improvement before the grouping or integration.

Unbreakable Functionality(Regression)

While you are restructuring your code to fix the bugs execute the codesets to inspect the real case scenario. The flavor or functionality doesn’t lose its actual mechanism.

Recursion in Javascript

Independence & scalability

Unit testing allows flexible and reusable codes to eliminate dependencies. It will enable easy swapping and scalability to extend the functionality of software safely without affecting the core features.

Small chunks have better coverage

Splitting the application into various testable component sets efficiently covers most of the area.

Attempt These Top 12 Best practices for Unit Testing

Curated these 12 best unit testing practices here. Manage the clean code for the project development with error handling.

Automated Testcases Approach

You can go for an Automated Testing practice. It enables proper configuration. Review the relevant metrics, reports, test run counts, and updated code. Furthermore, it helps you to measure your performance. You must create the desirable module code in a framework or template. It is worth continuous integration development. Manual testing will take a big share of your valuable time. Alternatively, it makes the testing task more tedious. Automated testing is a reliable practice to resolve the configuration burden.

Triple A Approach(AAA)

Enhance the readability of code through the AAA approach/ protocol. It’s a standard testing practice to cover whether your module fulfills the expectations. Thus you will set up or arrange that section of code to test a condition for the objects. Secondly, look for the Act on the given method. Later, you will figure out the Assertive expectations.

• Arrange the Test
• Act
• Assert

Test-driven Development

It is an inseparable testing process in the software development procedure. In this test strategy, we contrast the test codes to enhance the readability of software code before jumping on to actual production.

This process includes the following steps:

• Craft a test understanding the process
• Perform the test cases to figure out the bug or feature
• In case it fails, please include some more code
• Reexecute the code
• If the expectation failed, then restructure the code

It is an iterative process that continues until we have well-structured innovative concise code that satisfies the production requirement.

Inactive API call

API calls and service calls disturb the flow of test cases. If they are not as engaging or serve any value to defined test cases, set them at disable. Instead of specific units, have an API stub to deal with expected behavior and responses.

Prepare Documentation

For every software development project, a documentation file is formatted. It summarizes the requirements, user expectations, prototype design, coding snippets, etc.

This documentation also includes the test cases with possible outcomes. It is advised to craft reviewable, archivable, repeatable test cases with detailed explanations. Thus, it can guide you to fix the valuable resource and sync everything as updated lines.

Precise Test Intent

Pick a test case name satisfying the context and intent so that it would be understandable for any individual to work on. If people recognize the short test case name, then avoid long strings. It will improve the test readability score, and other team members won’t find any difficulties making modifications or extensions in different test cases.

Single Usecase

First, recognize the root cause and write up the test case accordingly. Each use case is designed to fulfill a specific testing purpose, so the same rule applies to the test cases. Therefore, map one test case with one use case. It gives you clarity and reduces test failures.

Never Aim Higher

While designing the test constraints, rather than focusing on 100% verification and approval, please concentrate on probable possibilities. Sometimes the logic doesn’t comply with theories. In return, we don’t have any decidable outcome. Alternatively, the budget/ time doesn’t fit our ability and may impact the testing. As a result, we left unsatisfied with the 100% test coverage.

Consistent Behaviour Test

No matter how often we execute the function test case, it should have consistency. The outcome could be anything negative or positive. We aim to reduce the inconsistent code to achieve the desired results for the function.

Versatile Testcase

Be attentive while structuring the test case for a desirable outcome. You should think about every scenario and possible aspect. Cover all unlikely events that you could encounter at some point. The flowchart will help you prepare the test case for the different true and false scenarios. Also, you should brainstorm on how to deal with errors.

Give immediate attention to the test failure, and dig out the root cause of why it didn’t work. Avoiding this can put you on the stack. You can’t leave a single bug; it’s intolerable. Exercising with the bugs will impact the production phase. Take the code review seriously and check both the application code and testcases.

Keep everything in an organized format to test the behavior of the application.

Prepare Independent Testcase

A testcase can only depend on stubs, but it shouldn’t rely on other tests. Any dependency would ruin the outcome and will not give help to reach any decision. You should focus on enhancing the code quality for better application code configuration.

Robustness / Security Testing

The Dynamic Application Security Testing Scanner provides easy integration support to every component/ functionality. It supports all modern software development technologies and architectures.

Final words

Unit Testing is an effective practice to get the best coverage of each small module. But due to time and budget constraints, it may be exhausted. Thus before stepping ahead with this, you must have a well-defined plan. An application has various functions, statements, and paths; we cover and inspect all of them in unit testing. Selenium Cucumber JUnit, Cunit, Moq, HTMLUnit, and Embunit are remarkable unit testing frameworks. It includes a test Suite for test case aggregation, a test runner for automated execution, and a test fixture for a fixed environment.

Software developers are closely involved in the development, so they can efficiently perform the unit testing for your projects. Overwhelming code lines are challenging to draw the desired outcomes and don’t with safety constraints. Thus, Unit Testing helps to minimize the regression and wipe off the inconsistency before the implementation.

QA and software development teams collaborate to incorporate the best unit testing practices. They are aimed to write and dictate the error-free, less time-consuming, rich-quality code. It is always advised to perform unit testing before grouping the components/ modules. Unit testing is about figuring out and fixing the code in this initial testing phase. Unit testing is an efficient method that has the power to influence debugging.