What are the most important automation tests to have in your team? In order to write high quality, reusable software and ensure your work is maintainable, it is essential that you maintain good software practices. One of these is testability. Testing your code allows you to verify that it works correctly without actually deploying it into a production environment.

If you are able to run automated tests on your code after every build, then this will help minimize the occurrence of software defects which will make testing and fixing bugs easier when they do happen.

a) Unit Testing

The concept of unit testing can be applied to any software logic. The idea is to test a single unit of code and verify that it works as expected. A unit could be a function, method or a block of code. Even objects can be considered units when you only test the methods they expose while hiding the complexity of their implementation details. When writing automated unit tests, it is said that you should write your tests before developing your production code. This ensures that you have some sort of test coverage for your code and also helps document how the code is meant to behave.

What Is Unit Testing?
Unit testing is an important software development practice carried out as part of the software testing process to ensure quality. A unit test is a test case written by programmers or occasionally by white box testers, to verify that individual units of source code are working properly. Unit tests are often written after the source code is developed.
There are three primary benefits of unit testing:
Test Driven Development , which promotes code reuse, enhances maintainability and makes testing easier. Test driven development can eliminate bugs in the code and make it more readable. Unit testing also helps identify design flaws by making sure that units work exactly as intended.

b) Integration Testing

Integration testing is carried out to verify that all modules of the application (including components and end-user interfaces) are working correctly together. For example, this takes place when you are developing a functionality that requires getting data from a database which you have no control over. This is when you will use integration testing as there is no way you can programmatically test every single aspect of your code. Integration testing validates the business logic and its chances of failure, if any, and helps identify bugs that may arise during user interactions with the application.

c) UI Tests

UI (user interface) testing is carried out to verify that the application behaves as expected when a user interacts with it. This kind of testing helps eliminate bugs that may arise due to incorrect validation, unexpected input values, etc. It can also be used to check the output in cases where there are no predefined thresholds.

Testing is the single biggest inhibitor of productivity and profitability in most organizations. Testing is typically focused on validating program correctness, but should be more broadly viewed as a tool to support good decision making. For example, a good test strategy will also identify risks, as well as drive out knowledge about the system under test.

d) Functional Tests

Functional software testing is testing that focuses on how well a specific software function (or set of functions) satisfies customer needs. A functional test verifies that all aspects of the business requirements for a particular feature are met (e.g., “We can browse for articles within our app”). Reliability testing focuses on whether a system or application continues to work properly after it has been deployed.

Conclusion

Testing during development ensures that your code will have good test coverage to minimize bug occurrence during production deployment. This helps you deliver higher quality software and maintain your code better in the long run.

Testing should also be part of your CI/CD pipeline which will help you automatically run unit tests, integration tests, UI tests when every build is deployed into a testing environment for verification against the master branch’s status.

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