Apache Jakarta and Beyond: A Java Programmer’s Introduction

Chapter 4. Testing with JUnit

Sooner or later all code will be tested. In the worst possible case this testing is done by an end user who uncovers a bug and becomes justifiably upset. It is therefore in everyone’s interest that testing be done as early as possible and under tightly controlled conditions.

No large program can do without extensive manual testing, and no large company can do without an intelligent and dedicated quality assurance staff. For reasons that are difficult to quantify, humans are remarkably good at finding unforeseen problems in untested code. It is also true that developers are often not the best people to find problems with their own code.

This certainly does not mean that developers should not test their code, but it does ...