Unit Testing A Growing Priority For Global Development Teams

Agitar Software 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, 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.

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“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% of Java developers are using unit-testing tools and 71% are using JUnit. The survey also finds that today only 19% 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 organisations. Today – mostly thanks to JUnit – unit testing is considered a best practice."