Unit Testing Automation: A growing priority

MUMBAI, INDIA: Agitar Software, provider of unit testing solutions, has announced results from a survey that found unit testing as a growing development practice with significant additional market opportunity within financial services, telecommunications, retail, manufacturing and IT consulting. The study conducted worldwide by a California-based firm Evans Data reveals that unit testing is used most often in North America and least in EMEA. It is also used proportionately more in enterprises with more than 1,000 employees.

According to the study, nearly three quarters of Java developers worldwide use the open-source JUnit testing framework, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, to expedite and simplify testing to improve software quality. Industry research also shows that fixing a bug in Quality Assurance (QA) can cost 100 times more than fixing it during development. This inefficient workflow makes software late and expensive, whereas unit testing helps ensure code works correctly early on and improves the agility, quality and costs of application software development.

With unit testing, software developers create tests for their code as they develop it. This allows development teams to inspect the building blocks of a system during each phase of development, which produces more cost-effective, flexible, and high-quality software. Downloaded more than two million times, and included as a plug-in in all major IDEs, the first version of JUnit was co-created by Kent Beck (an Agitar Fellow since July 2004) and Erich Gamma ten years ago. Since then, it has helped developers prevent and catch countless numbers of software defects.

“The adoption of JUnit has far exceeded my early expectations,” said Beck. “However, far too much programming is still done without the benefit of tests. I believe that the biggest barrier to greater adoption is culture. For decades, programmers have ceded responsibility for quality to someone else. Programmers need to turn this around and insist that their code work before asking anyone else to invest time in it. There is also the need for better design skills. You can only write better tests if you can design better software (more modular, less coupling, more cohesion). To get better tests, you need more skilled programmers making good large- and small-scale design decisions. Finally, the tools could still be even simpler and provide higher value. That was the goal behind the latest release of JUnit 4.4,” he added.

“Unit testing is gradually becoming imperative to software development and is considered a best practice. JUnit’s success and impact on software development is indeed commendable and nothing short of a testing revolution. We feel this is only the beginning and software development teams, especially in India, have a long way to go in testing automation,” says Vishnu Raned, Country Manager, Agitar Software (India).

The survey shows that 87 percent of Java developers are using unit-testing tools and 71 percent are using JUnit. The survey also finds that today only 19 percent of Java developers have adopted unit testing automation tools.

“JUnit has had a remarkable impact on the way software is developed and tested. It literally started a developer testing revolution,” said Agitar CTO and Co-Founder Alberto Savoia. “But we have only scratched the surface of what’s possible when testing is moved forward in the development process. Ten years ago, holding developers responsible for unit testing their own code would have been a pipe dream in most organizations. Today – mostly thanks to JUnit – unit testing is considered a best practice.”

“Evans Data research, and our own experience, shows that for unit testing to reach its full potential, developers need additional tools and automation to help them deal with the more difficult and time-consuming aspects of test generation, execution, and management,” said Savoia. “That’s the reason why we started Agitar Software – to help continue what Kent Beck and Erich Gamma started with JUnit.”

AgitarOne from Agitar Software is the only comprehensive, fully integrated, unit-testing solution available in the market. AgitarOne not only automates testing with JUnit, it handles legacy code, shortens QA cycles, and provides continuous visibility into code quality.