Unit Testing Course for AG Prime developers

We care about our people and the development of their skills and career so we invest in people's formal education, personal soft skills and teamwork.

Last month our developers learned how to build better software during the Unit Testing course by Adrian Bolboaca (Mozaic Works). It was proposed for developers to write simple and easy to maintain unit tests. Through hands-on exercises they understood basic techniques to write unit tests in the context of their work.

The term “unit testing” refers to the individual testing of separate units on a system software, “units” are usually classes and methods. Unit testing items make available tools to be recorded and repeated later, usually when a part of the software system is changed.

The course helps us to identify failures in our code or it’s logic and helps also to improve the quality assurance of the software products. In this way developers will not spend a lot of hours fixing bugs and our customers or users will receive an application more secure, more stable, cleaner and easier to develop. By running unit tests the code can be easily verified and the logic of unit specifications is correct applied.

Unit testing gives the ability to verify that the functions works well and as expected. Automating the developer tests is a proven way of reducing issues while increasing productivity over the entire lifetime of the project.Automated tests are a solution if testing the application takes a long time, the team finds issues that could have been avoided during development (crashes, unexpected behaviors, etc.), the maintenance of the project is costly or end users or the customer find issues in the product. We don't want that to happen.

During 2 days of workshop our developers took part on a full and intense schedule.

• On the first day developers were introduced to unit testing, hand-rolled unit testing framework, xUnit Frameworks, state tests, value domain sampling, hand-rolled stubs, collaboration tests, hand-rolled mocks and behavior slicing.

• Mock framework, refactoring tests, how to organize tests for a large system, advanced unit testing topics were discussed on the second day, during 2 sessions remote hands-on.

Even if it’s hard to cover everything in two days with a fixed schedule, on the point of view of our developers the presentation was good and all the principles conducted by one person to us were achieved. Unit tests are fundamental in the application testing strategy, exercising the functionality of the smallest unit of code in a repeatable way.

Unit testing is one of the among methods the programmers can use in order to reduce the number of mistakes they make when are coding. Used correct, unit testing can significantly reduce the time spent to repair bugs in applications. But testing the units have to be adopted with care.

An external aid, the course from Mozaic Works supported by experienced people, can make a difference between one and the successful adoption issues.