Okay, okay. I’ll admit it. My own stubbornness has made me late to the unit testing party. I was one of those developers who always thought to myself that I don’t need to do unit testing. I can test my code well enough and besides who as time to waste writing all those tests anyway.
Enter Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the Pragmatic Programmers, and their book Pragmatic Unit Testing In C# with NUnit from O’Reilly come in. This book helped me see that unit testing added into my existing software development process can, for the cost of a little extra work up front, will save loads of time and headaches at the end of a project cycle.
Admittedly, When I started with this I was a little overwhelmed. My project has 100s of thousands lines of code and I wasn’t sure where to start. So I started slowly building tests and refactoring little pieces at a time. Not trying to rewrite the entire application, but just little chucks at a time. I now know that over time the benefits of these techniques will become greater and greater. With a codebase that is much less fragile than it is today.
This is a great book and I recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about Unit Testing. The book is available from O’Reilly’s site.
Rob Conery has a great free screencast that covers the basics of Unit Testing on the TekPub website.
Leave a Reply