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I write them to improve my productivity as a programmer. Making the quality assurance department happy is just a side effect. Unit tests are highly localized. Each test class works within a single package. It tests the interfaces to other packages, but beyond that it assumes the rest just works.
Functional tests are a different animal. They are written to ensure the software as a whole works. They provide quality assurance to the customer and don't care about programmer productivity. They shoul
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― Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
― Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
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Tests shouldn’t verify units of code. Instead they should verify units of behavior: something that is meaningful for the problem domain and ideally something that a business person can recognize as useful. The number of classes it takes to implement such a unit of behavior is irrelevant. The unit could span across multiple classes or only one class, or even take up just a tiny method. [...] A test should tell a story about the problem your code helps to share, and this story should be cohesive a
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― Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns
― Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns
