Title
Writing unit tests: It's now or never!
Abstract
Unit testing is an important quality assurance method but a challenge in the context of legacy code. We share our experiences in trying to create tests for existing code by means of two examples from a large industrial software system and list common testability issues observed. Although much effort and resources have been invested, the retrofitting of unit tests was only partially successful. Our findings are that the probability that code without initial tests will ever get covered by unit tests is very low. Only the existence of unit tests ensures testability of the code under test. Besides finding defects unit tests also ensure modular design, which is the base for reuse, maintainability and testability. As a consequence, code and tests should be written together, ideally in a test-driven way.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/ICSTW.2015.7107469
Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops
Keywords
Field
DocType
program testing,software maintenance,software quality,software reusability,industrial software system,legacy code,maintainability,modular design,quality assurance method,testability,testability issues,unit testing,test automation
Black-box testing,Testability,Software engineering,Computer science,Unit testing,White-box testing,Regression testing,Legacy code,Acceptance testing,Reliability engineering,Development testing
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2159-4848
3
0.52
References 
Authors
3
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Claus Klammer160.92
Albin Kern230.52