Unit Testing: Process, Objectives, Tools, Advantages and Disadvantages

In this blog post, we will discuss the concept of unit testing, objectives of performing unit testing, techniques involved in performing unit testing, tools used to perform unit testing and the advantages as well as disadvantages of performing unit testing in a detailed and comprehensive manner.

Concept of Unit Testing

• Unit Testing, part of functional testing, is the type of Software Testing in which the individual unit or component of the software or application is tested to examine the different parts of the software or application. 
• Unit Testing is done from the developer side during the development (coding) phase of the software or application. 

• Unit Testing is the first level of testing done before Integration Testing in SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) & STLC (Software Testing Life Cycle). 

Objectives of Unit Testing

Following are some of the objectives on which every test engineer should focus when performing unit testing of any software application: –

• Unit Testing’s primary objective is to validate unit components of the software or application with its performance. That’s why it is also known as component testing as well. 

• Unit Testing is performed to test the correctness of the isolated code. A unit component is an individual function or code of the software or application. 

• Unit Testing is performed to understand the base of code that makes tester and developer able to change the code quickly as per the defect in the software or application. 

• Unit Testing is performed to fix the defects or bugs of software or application in the development phase. 

Techniques involved in performing unit testing

There are three types of testing techniques involved in performing unit testing on any software application: –

Black Box Testing:

Black Box Testing technique to conduct unit testing involves covering the unit tests for input, user interface and outer parts of the software or application. 

White Box Testing:

White Box Testing technique to conduct unit testing involves testing the functional behavior of the software or application by giving the input and checking the functionality output. 

Grey Box Testing:

Grey Box Testing technique to conduct unit testing involves executing the relevant test cases, test methods, test functions, and analyse the code performance of software or application. 

Tools used to perform unit testing

Following are some of the best and most popular tools used to perform unit testing of any software application:

• Junit: It is one of the best and most popularly used tool to perform unit testing of any software or application. Being open-source and support of Java programming language, it provides annotations to identify test method. It will test data first and then inserted in the piece of code, which provides consistency of the development code and reduces the time for debugging. 

• Nunit: It is yet another popularly used tool to perform unit testing of any software or application. Being open-source, initially ported from Junit support of all .net languages, this tool is widely used for all unit-testing frameworks and support data-driven tests as well which can run in parallel. 

• TestNG: TestNG stands for test next generation is yet another popularly used tool to perform unit testing. It is an advance unit testing tool, which is simulated from Junit and Nunit testing frameworks with additional features or functionalities like additional annotation, parallel execution, group execution, HTML report and listeners which make TestNG a strong and powerful tool used to perform unit testing of any software or application. 

• JMockit: It is yet another open-source and popularly used tool to perform unit testing of any software or application. It is a mocking framework that is used in performing unit testing with the support of Java programming language. The primary objective of using this tool is to simply the development of a test by mocking external dependencies and use them in test code. 

• PHPunit: It is yet another open-source and popularly used tool to perform unit testing of any software or application. It supports the use of PHP programming language and takes small portion of code which is called as units and test each of them separately. The tool also allows developers to use pre-define assertion methods to assert that a software or application behave in a certain manner. 

Advantages of Unit Testing

Following is some of the advantages of performing unit testing for any software application:

• Unit Testing allows testers to test any unit or components of the software or application without waiting for the completion of another parts of testing. 

• Unit Testing allows the developer to learn and understand what functionality is provided by unit test suits for unit API. 

• Unit Testing’s major advantage is code reusability which allows the developer to refactor code after a number of days to ensure the software or application is still working without any issues or defects. 

Disadvantages of Unit Testing

Following are some of the disadvantages of performing unit testing for any software application:

• Unit Testing is a time-consuming process for writing unit test cases. 

• Unit Testing doesn’t address all the issues, defects or errors in the software or application because of integration testing can cover these problems. 

• Unit Testing is not efficient for checking the errors in the UI (User Interface) of software or application. 

• Unit Testing requires lot of time for maintenance when the source code of software or application is changed frequently. 

• Unit Testing doesn’t cover all the non-functional aspects of the software or application such as compatibility, accessibility, usability, reliability, performance and security etc. 

Conclusion

So, in the end, we can conclude to say that there can be a lot involved in unit testing; it can be complex or rather simple depending on the software or application being tested and the testing strategies as well as tools involved. Unit testing is always essential or necessary on some level, and that is a certainty for sure. 

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