Very nice commentary on why it is difficult to take up automated unit testing in many shops (with a slight focus on Java shops)

The question remains, however; is unit testing doomed? The answer to this question, of course, depends on your point of view, baby– or more precisely, what kind of development you are currently performing. For, as Andrew noted, if you are currently practicing Agile development, where unit testing has taken a strong hold and where “developers write hundreds of small tests for exercising their own code” the answer to the former question is a resounding no!

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The reality of the Java market though, is that there is an entire throng of people who didn’t (or couldn’t) jump on the JUnit bandwagon all those years ago– this crowd is largely maintaining enterprise applications that are, simply put, incredibly hard to unit test, man. In these organizations, I have found that, more often than not, this is where the battle for tried and true unit testing is being lost.

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Think about it for a second– unit testing is the elephant in the room. You’ve just been asked to eat it. But you can’t just take a steak knife and fork and start eating– the elephant is still alive looking right at you. No, you’ve got to first kill it, cut it up, cook it, etc. No wonder few people eat the elephant. Burger King is around the corner! No wonder unit testing often times seems doomed. We have a QA team that finds bugs!

Indubitably, these development teams are forced to rely on late cycle testing or at best, in the short term, can of course build up a hip suite of higher level tests. As a matter of fact, this is probably the best place to start! Can’t isolate that Account object for unit testing? No problem, bite the bullet and code an integration test– just make sure you realize you’ve got to handle the myriad dependencies associated with that business transaction (think a properly seeded database, etc).

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As I said, if unit testing, as it is defined within the context of TDD, is an elephant for you and your organization, then it

is likely to remain a niche solution, found at organizations that really understand its value and progressively adopted by sites that can no longer stand the long debug cycles.

The answer to most questions depends on your point of view– if you are working on a team that has embraced agile principles, unit testing is alive and well. It’s a healthy practice that when questioned brings extreme consternation to those who’ve drank the Kool-Aid.

If you find yourself working on a legacy code base, your answer might be somewhat different– indeed, unit testing in these cases is not as easy as downloading JUnit and coding away. It’s a sizable elephant that a culture has to collectively figure out how to eat. And that takes time, commitment, and a lot of discipline. If you can’t get a handle on those three aspects, then yes, unit testing is doomed. Can you dig it, man?

I don’t have even the remotest clue of what is likely to have gone wrong here .. but just seems to prima facie suggest one more situation where sites in production requiring to have automated test cases to help test all upgrades.

PS : This group seems to have a nice feature indicating the user sentiments – smileys (or should we call it frowneys)