Testers Adding Value to Unit Tests

Development practices like Test-Driven Development can lead to high levels of Unit Test coverage. Sometimes, the team reaches 100% statement coverage.  How can testers add value when the code is “fully covered”?

Example of a project with 100% Unit Test Coverage

Example of a project with 100% Unit Test Coverage

I provide a few examples in this Sticky Minds article:

Review unit tests for missing cases. Just because the code is fully executed doesn’t mean all of the cases are used which might cause the code to fail.

Review unit tests against the product requirements. The unit tests will check that the code works as the developer intended. Sometimes, you can verify that the functionality meets the requirements.

Review the unit tests themselves. Having 100% coverage for unit tests means that the code was executed during a test, not that the tests are good, or even test anything.  Check that the assertions are valid and useful.

Review Exception Handling.  Unit testing is a good way to test the exception handling because the developer has full control of the mocked environment and can simulate the exceptions. These exceptions are difficult to inject in other types of testing, so making sure the unit tests do a good job is important.

Other ideas? Great, please check out the article and leave a comment either here or there.

 

One thought on “Testers Adding Value to Unit Tests

  1. Rachel Brubaker

    Review unit tests for inbuilt bias/assumptions duplicated between implementation and test. E.g. that an injected data structure contains no duplicates, or the element sequencing forms a monotonic function.

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