Unit Testing and Its Benefits

Unit Testing is one of the types of functional software testing of applications. It is a sort of software testing where each unit or component of a software or application is tested. The objective is to validate that every unit of the software code proceeds and performs in an expected manner. Unit Testing is conducted during the development (coding phase) of an application by the developers. Unit testing ensures that all code meets quality standards before it’s deployed. 

Advantages of Unit Testing

Here are the reasons why:

• Unit testing makes it safer and easier to restructure the code by putting tests into place that make sure restructure occurs without problems and disruption. It removes risk out of changing older source code.
• Doing unit tests is fundamentally doing quality assurance of the code. It exhibits problems and bugs before the application has an integration test. Conducting a testing process before the coding is completed solves issues and challenges creators to write better code.
• Unit Testing helps in finding problems and resolving the issues before further testing resulting into not affecting other parts of the code of the application. It will also cover and fix the bugs in a programmer’s execution.
• Unit Testing also allows the restructuring of code and makes integration simpler. 
• This type of testing tracks a system and creates documentation. It helps understand the unit’s interface.
• Unit Testing makes the process of debugging easier.
• Unit Testing implies better code and design whether you are using C#, Java, Python, JavaScript, or Php. It means you have a well-defined code with high consistency.
• Unit testing makes it safer and easier to restructure the code by putting tests into place that make sure restructuring occurs without any hindrances and abruption. It removes the risk out of changing older source code.
• Using unit testing and favourable unit testing tools means that you reduce the overall cost of a project. Bug detection at primary stages results in  less late changes and easier to trace issues than if it is done at a subsequent stage.

Let’s have a look towards these popular unit testing tools

1) NUnit

• NUnit is a unit testing framework based on.NET platform
• It is a free tool allows to write test scripts manually but not automatically
• Supports data-driven tests that can run in parallel
• Uses Console Runner to load and execute tests

Official Link: NUnit

2) JMockit

• For Unit Testing another tool is JMockit, it is an open-source tool for Unit Testing with the collection of tools and API
• It is an open source software licensed under the MIT License.
• Using TestNG or JUnit, developers can use this tool to write test
• JMockit is considered as an alternative to the formal use of the mock object
• This tool gives 3 types of code coverage such as Line Coverage, Path Coverage, and Data Coverage

Official Link: JMockit

3) Emma

• Emma is an open source Tool to measure Java code coverage.
• For each and every developer, It enables the code coverage, in the team rapidly
• Emma supports line, class, method and basic block coverage and report types like text, HTML, XML etc.
• It is fully Java-based tool without external library dependencies and access to the source code

Official Link: Emma

4) Quilt HTTP

• It is a free cross-platform based software utility and Java software development tool.
• It helps to measure coverage of Java programs in unit testing using Statement Coverage
• It just manipulates classes and machine code of JVM ( Java Virtual machine), without working on source code
• Quilt provides methods to control flow graphs and also facilitates report generations and also provides JUnit interoperability 

Official Link: Quilt

5) HtmlUnit

• It is an open-source Java library which contains GUI-less browser for Java programs
• HTMLUnit tool supports JavaScript and provides GUI features like forms, links, tables, etc.
• It is a framework based on Java unit testing for testing web applications that are used within frameworks like JUnit, TestNG
• HtmlUnit uses the JavaScript engine known as Mozilla Rhino
• It Supports protocols like HTTP, HTTPS along with a cookie, submit methods like GET, POST, and proxy server

Official Link: HtmlUni

Regardless, what code you are testing, predetermination of bugs and errors ahead of time is helpful and time saving. With a better QA team and screening bugs at an early stage should be efficient and helpful to deliver the best outcome.