Effective Unit Testing

Part 1. Foundations

This first part of the book aims to give you, the reader, and me, the author, a shared context to build upon throughout the chapters. With the ultimate purpose of this book being to help you improve your ability to write good tests, chapter 1 begins with an overview of what kind of value we can extract from writing tests in the first place. Once we’ve discussed the dynamics of programmer productivity and the kind of impact that our tests—and the quality of our tests—can have on it, we’ll conclude the chapter with a brief introduction to two methods that are closely related to automated tests: test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD).

Chapter 2 takes on the challenge of defining what makes for a good ...