It’s hard to understate the importance of testing in software development. In fact, testing products before release is critical no matter what type of product you’re developing. So it’s no wonder that there are countless methodologies and approaches to testing and quality assurance of products and services.
Two of the most commonly used types of tests used in software development today are unit tests and integration tests.
Unit Tests
A Unit Test is a way of testing a unit - the smallest piece of code that can be logically isolated in a system. In most programming languages, that is a function, a subroutine, a method or property. The isolated part of the definition is important. In his book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code", author Michael Feathers states that such tests are not unit tests when they rely on external systems: “If it talks to the database, it talks across the network, it touches the file system, it requires system configuration, or it can't be run at the same time as any other test."
Integration Tests
Integration Testing is defined as a type of testing where software modules are integrated logically and tested as a group. A typical software project consists of multiple software modules, coded by different programmers. The purpose of this level of testing is to expose defects in the interaction between these software modules when they are integrated.
So, Why you need to perform both unit testing and integration testing?
Understanding and employing the various tests in the development life cycle is key to an efficient and headache-free DevOps experience.
So as you orchestrate the phases of testing and quality assurance through your CI/CD pipelines, remember that at the end of the day, you’re the one putting the puzzle together for deployment to end users.
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