There is a debate brewing in the IT Department between QA and Development. The Sr. Development Manager believes that it will cost too much money to unit test new applications. He believes that the RAD process is the way to avoid unit testing. The QA Manager refuses to accept any applications without unit test results.

What do you think?

-- Anonymous, September 06, 2001

Answers

Any procedure that will reduce bugs with a minor effort is well worth the price. And it is a minor effort for new code. But the benefits of unit testing do not stop with the bug reduction. Unit testing also requires you to write clean unit interfaces with loose coupling between components and clear responsibilities, which promotes reusability and eases maintainance.

I am a developer. Our company does not even _have_ a person with a QA role. Still, I try to unit test all my new stuff. Much of the existing code that I'm maintaining that wasn't designed for unit testing is a mess, and can't be unit tested, maintained or reused without great effort.

-- Anonymous, September 06, 2001