Typemock, the leading provider and pioneer of automated unit testing solutions held a corporate event to celebrate eight years since its founding. CEO Eli Lopian addressed the gathering and laid out his thoughts on the necessity of unit testing in software development: “Any software programmer that does not do unit testing is a reckless coder”, declared Lopian. “Unit testing is an essential part of any software development process. It allows you to deliver working code, with fewer bugs, faster. Typemock has made huge advances with its automated unit testing tools in the past eight years. The old arguments that unit testing is too hard no longer apply!”
Lopian noted that Agile Software Development has become widely accepted in recent years, but that some programmers still insist that unit testing is not an integral part of the Agile process. Lopian argues this point: “Without unit testing you may think you are Agile, you may be running fast but you are not healthy, you won’t be able to keep up to speed. Sooner or later, you, or even worse: your customers, will start finding bugs which will compel you to introduce changes to what is now legacy code – without any tests to show you what you’ve done wrong. In today’s hyper-competitive market, corporations cannot afford the resource and time drain of having to re-write their entire code every few years due to code decay.”
Lopian predicted that in the coming years all software will be developed with unit testing. He hopes the change will come from industry-made regulations similar to ISO, so that “software safety standards” will be in place. “As a developer myself, I have a dream”, Lopian ended, “that programmers will take the leap and become agile – really agile! This means not being afraid of legacy code, this means being proud of the software they’ve created, and this means building usable and sustainable code for millions of users. All this is within everyone’s reach right now – with unit testing”.
