Effective Unit Testing

Chapter 1. The promise of good tests

 

In this chapter

• The value of having unit tests
• How tests contribute to a programmer’s productivity
• Using tests as a design tool

 

When I started getting paid for programming, the world looked a lot different. This was more than 10 years ago and people used simple text editors like Vim and Emacs instead of today’s integrated development environments like Eclipse, Net-Beans, and IDEA. I vividly remember a senior colleague wielding his Emacs macros to generate tons of calls to System.out.println as he was debugging our software. Even more vivid are my memories of deciphering the logs those printouts ended up in after a major customer had reported that their orders weren’t going through ...