I’ll get back to the GDPR series tomorrow.
Can I get a show of hands, How many people do unit testing? I’ve been in a lot of shops where unit testing and code reviews have been passed up in the name of Agile. First off, this is a misunderstanding of what Agile is. You do need to do Unit Test when doing Agile and code reviews are still highly recommended. Because this is not a post on Agile, that’s all I’ll say on that.
I’ve been working on a fairly complex problem for the past few months, that involves advanced analytics, and some simple test against a data set. This wound up being several thousand lines of code that had to be fast, accurate, secure and stable. Here is a shameless plug for SQL Developer, there is an awesome and flexible unit testing module built in to it. It’s quite easy to setup, and give you testing that is repeatable. Jeff Smith has a good write up on setting up and using Unit Testing. Oh, and did I mention, it’s free! Thanks guys.
So after building all my code, I was able to design some test to exercise all the procedures and functions for both successful execution and generate exceptions; so I know my code and deal with any exceptions that may come up.
If any test fail, the entire test fails. When all the test pass, than the testing has past. Really this made my job a lot easier. Identifying what code has bugs is easy, knowing what the input is, what is expected and what failed is easy.
Now that unit testing is complete, integration testing can start. Life is good.