Black box or unit testing
on Saturday, November 24th, 2007
Nobody denies the benefits of testing and especially unit testing.
However I’m still having hard time understanding the baised testing methodology of phpunit or other automated unit testing frameworks.
In test driven development, programmer writes a test then fills in the code to make the test pass. I find this extremely baised.
Alternatively, I find coding baised test cases that can cover the code 100% gives the developers a false sense of safety. This is rather a phylosophycal discussion than practical.
For complex scenarios of testing, can unit testing cover everything efficiently? How efficient is to find and write the correct test cases that test everything throughly? Does any company have the time and money for this (or they are willing to pay for their testers to write code for 100% coverage) ?
I really like the idea of php unit and automated tests. However for web, I’m still for the black box testing, if there is a good way of analysing the efficiency of blackbox tests.
Feel free to comment.
Updated: typos