It’s that time of year when the US president gives the annual State of the Union. Since Mr. Obama did not mention unit testing, (I suspect because of homeland security issues) I thought I’d give you my view of where unit testing is in the beginning of 2012.
- Unit testing and TDD are getting traction. More people understand the value, and more developers see that testing is part of what makes them professional.
- Unit testing has a wide acceptance across technologies. Developers who unit test, do it across languages.
- More and more, we regard unit testing as a skill, rather than a development methodology. As any skill it is learned, experienced, improved and mastered. Some people go all the way, some people start and turn back, never to return.
- Mastering unit testing requires discipline. Discipline begets professionalism. Those things go together, and why you’ll find both traits in successful developers.
- A lot more people do not unit test than those who do. That’s because unit testing is still hard. The tools are mostly there (depending on the technology and language). Successful developers do not just master tools, but also apply their experience on how to write tests, organize them and maintain them. This is not taught anywhere, and most developers don’t have the mentors, drive or discipline for the long haul.
- In many organizations that unit test, it’s not really wide spread. A few teams do it, the rest don’t. In order to do an organizational change, you’ll need the skilled people in place to drive the rest of the teams. Since there aren’t many of those around, the organization adoption is very slow.
So what’s next?
The slow adoption rate will change based on two things: better tools that make it easier to test and fix bugs, and the availability of many people to drive teams toward adoption. Typemock will drive the first part (I’ve already alluded to new features in Isolator V7 and that’s just the beginning) but the community needs to do the evangelizing and education that will get more people into the unit testing circle. With more people around we can turn the trickle into a torrent.
And then nobody will have bugs! But I’ll leave that to next year’s State of the Union.
Beg to differ? Write down you’re assessments and predictions in the comments!
