Pro WPF and Silverlight MVVM: Effective Application Development with Model-View-ViewModel

Chapter 7. Unit Testing

The Importance of Testing

As a discipline, software engineering encompasses many different skills, techniques, and methods. Dabbling with database administration, setting up development and production environments, designing user interfaces are all occasional tasks aside from the primary role of implementing solutions, which is writing code.

One skill, above all, has a perceived malignancy that is directly proportional to its objective importance: testing. Software is absolutely useless if it does not—or, more accurately, cannot—carry out the tasks it was created to perform. Worse still is software which errs insidiously but purports to function correctly, undermining the trust of the end user.

Software failures can be merely ...