ASP.NET has openned a poll to ask the developers about their usage (if any) on the Unit Testing. Amazingly 45.63% of the developers are not aware of the Unit Test. And 31.88% of the developers have not implemented the Unit Tests in their application. This all leads to the quality of the product. Since, most of the above mentioned developers have not implemented Unit Tests, the probablity of bugs in the application is pretty high.

What are Unit Tests?

Unit Tests are created before a single line of application code is written. The idea to create the Unit Tests is to write better code since the developer will only write the code on which the test is successful. Whenever you make a Unit Test the first time a test should fail. This failing should not be based on some logical mistake like doing 4 = 2+3 as this only proves that the tests are weak. Tests should fail because we have not implemented the particular method or it did not returned the expected value.  

The good thing about Unit Tests is that it helps you to better maintain the application. This means that if you add a new component and you are curious that if this component will mess up the old code. Then you can run the tests after adding the new component. If all tests succeeds then this means that the addition of the new component was successful.

The dark end of the Unit Testing is that you have to write lot of code and create lots of tests which pretty much means that you are writting a new application to test other application. This can be a pain if you have a deadline in few days and hence most of the developers skip Unit Testing.

I hope after reading this post you have the basic understanding of the purpose of Unit Testing. The tool that I use to test my application is NUnit and it is available for free at www.NUnit.org.