Bob's Blog

I never imagined that I'd say those words, but they're true. I must start by admitting that I wrote my first unit test a few days ago. I know, I'm bad, I should have been doing this for years. I've known about unit testing for a long time, I've been reading more and more about it, and listening to speakers at conferences extol its virtues. But somehow I just couldn't get my a$$ in gear. It just seemed like too much extra work. And as a sole developer working on relatively small projects I was able to get away with not doing it.

Anyway, I read a blog post a few days ago that inspired me to take the plunge. The post describes unit testing with CFUnit, but I'd been hearing a lot of good things about MXUnit, so I decided to give that a try.

I started by visiting the MXUnit Home Page, and went through steps 1 and 2, which I was able to complete without a hitch. I now had the framework and the Eclipse Plugin installed. I then visited the docs, and worked my way through the Base Tutorials. Within an hour I was up and running and writing my first real unit test. Kudos to the MXUnit team for a great product, and such clear and concise documentation.

The biggest surprise for me is just how much I enjoy unit testing. I guess it's more the whole process of Test-driven development (TDD) that I enjoy, but I do also like writing the tests themselves. It's like a whole new realm of problem solving has been opened up to me. I'm also already seeing how much time I'm saving this way - it's truly amazing.

I think I also found it easy to get started as I had one component that I decided to unit test. It was a nice, small place to start, and relatively easy to test.

So my advice to anyone else who's on the fence as I was; find a small component, give yourself a few hours to really get started, and you too may find that unit testing isn't painful at all.