Java Extreme Programming Cookbook

Unit Testing

A unit test is a programmer-written test for a single piece of functionality in an application. Unit tests should be fine grained, testing small numbers of closely-related methods and classes. Unit tests should not test high-level application functionality. Testing application functionality is called acceptance testing, and acceptance tests should be designed by people who understand the business problem better than the programmers.

Why Test?

XP cannot be done without unit testing. Unit tests build confidence that the code works correctly. Tests also provide the safety net enabling pairs of programmers to make changes to any piece of code in the system without fear. Making changes to code written by someone else takes courage, because you might not be familiar with all of the ins-and-outs of the original solution.

Imagine a scenario in which you are presented with a legacy payroll application consisting of 50,000 lines of code and zero unit tests. You have been asked to change the way that part-time employee salaries are computed, due to a recent change in the tax laws. After making the change, how can you be confident that you did not introduce a bug somewhere else in the system? In a traditional model, you hand the application to a quality assurance team that manually tests everything they can think of.^[12] Hopefully, everybody gets the correct paycheck next month.

Now imagine the XP scenario. If the original development team used XP, each class would have a suite of ...