Testing code

It’s important to test your code, and there are many theoretical beliefs that people have about writing and testing code. Some people feel you need to write tests with or before your code. Some people feel you should have a test for every “group” of code you write. This is typically a decision for the development team to make, but understanding why is often very useful. When we write tests before or with our code, we force ourselves to write testable code, in smaller chunks. Code coverage is an emotional discussion, but I have always found that it’s an easy way to improve the quality of code.

Unit tests

A unit test is a test that doesn’t exceed the bounds of the system running your code and looks to validate an assumption for a group of code. Unit tests are generally for functions, methods, and classes that do not interact with the “outside” world. When you have a function that interacts with the outside world but...