Typemock’s Gil Zilberfeld recently published an article on 3 ways to maintain quality in your unit tests in The Testing Planet. In the article, Gil reviewed three different techniques you and your team can learn to make sure that unit tests don’t become a burden to your team and your organization.
These techniques include:
- Test Reviews
- Separate Unit Tests from Other Types of Tests
- Use Good Naming Conventions
Test reviews are important in order check the developer’s understanding of the requirements or domain. They can also help discover several situations which lead to failed Agile development adoption.
Separating unit tests from other tests enables developers to have a single way to run tests that will always pass. This also reduces the chance that unit tests will fail due to configuration or other reasons or external dependencies. This also minimizes false positives.
Using good naming convention that captures key data will help ensure that the people reading the test will understand it and help them understand why a test may fail. Tests that are not readable will contribute to the lack of collaboration and willpower from people who try to use unit tests.
Read the article here (PDF) and start unit testing.
Does your team follow these techniques? If not, why not? What challenges does your team face?
