In this article I want to talk about a term that I think is just brilliant: technical debt! The term technical debt makes an analogy: it considers the use of quick, but poor, technical solutions to store up a form of debt. As with more conventional forms of debt, the immediate problem is solved, but Read more…
I’ve written a few articles about unit testing on this blog, but so far they’ve been about how to go about doing so and what supporting libraries/frameworks are available. Now I want to look at why unit testing is a good idea. In particular, this article will focus on the business perspective. Many software developers Read more…
At the end of my previous article Pros and Cons of Using the C assert Macro for Unit Testing in C/C++ I promised to follow up with an article summarising the popular unit testing libraries/frameworks. In this article I will give that summary: For the .NET languages there is NUnit. Although the source code is Read more…
This is a short follow-up to my recent article A Very Simple Introduction to Unit Testing. In that article I described the development of a very simple unit test for a very simple C++ class. To do this I used the C/C++ assert() macro, saying the following about it: "…although assert wasn’t originally intended for Read more…
The idea of unit testing is to write code that automatically tests other code, and that can be executed repeatedly. It has grown in popularity over the last few years, its profile having been raised by the test-driven development (TDD) practised within the agile development community. Note that unit testing is not, in itself, test Read more…