UNIT TESTING

Functional and reliability testing in an Engineering environment. Producing tests for the behavior of components of a product to ensure their correct behavior prior to system integration.

In computer programming, unit testing is a software design and development method where the programmer verifies that individual units of source code are working properly. A unit is the smallest testable part of an application. In procedural programming a unit may be an individual program, function, procedure, etc., while in object-oriented programming, the smallest unit is a method, which may belong to a base/super class, abstract class or derived/child class.

Ideally, each test case is independent from the others; Double objects like stubs, mock or fake objects as well as test harnesses can be used to assist testing a module in isolation. Unit testing is typically done by software developers to ensure that the code other developers have written meets software requirements and behaves as the developer intended.

A small change in the test may lead to much larger changes in the scaffolding. Internal and unit testing can be automated with the help of coverage tools. A coverage tool analyzes the source code and generates a test that will execute every alternative thread of execution. It is still up to the programmer to combine this test into meaningful cases to validate the result of each thread of execution. Typically, the coverage tool is used in a slightly different way. First the coverage tool is used to augment the source by placing informational prints after each line of code. Then the testing suite is executed generating an audit trail. This audit trail is analyzed and reports the percent of the total system code executed during the test suite. If the coverage is high and the untested source lines are of low impact to the system's overall quality, then no more additional tests are required.

■	Load Testing
■	Stress Testing
■	Domain Testing
■	Exploratory Testing
■	Recovery Testing
■	User Acceptance Testing
■	Alpha Testing
■	Beta Testing
■	Unit Testing
■	Static & Dynamic Analysis Testing
■	Functional Testing
■	Ad-hoc Testing
■	Volume Testing

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Unit Testing