This Is Why IBM I Series Unit Testing Is Actually A Good Method

By Daniel Stone


In every software development project, there will always be flaws. Even after initial and second release, bugs just become more difficult to track. Debugging then becomes a more difficult task if there is no proper flow in testing and there is no proper version control and documentation.

Operating systems such as Linux as Microsoft Windows 2000 use IBM systems. Most programming languages that run these systems include assembly, c, c++, Pascal, COBOL, Java and many more. IBM I series unit testing is used to test a lot of IBM i series applications. How the test process for these applications go, vary on the developers working on the project.

Unit testing is a method where a code is written to test the functionality of every working module in the overall software. Every time a module is released in the repository, test is also released and the fragment is assured to work. The unit tests also area part of version control so the other programmers and tester to test the features by themselves and more importantly, documentation.

With this type of test the bugs in the code are discovered even before the function is added into the repository and on to the clients and testers. As a type of TDD or Test Driven Development, developers constantly check for the bugs during the process of making the whole system. Even with the isolation of one fragment from another during the tests, the overall continuous database integrity is not compromised.

This prevents the faulty products to reach testers and clients since the programming team is alerted of them automatically. This makes the whole process to be less costly than passing something that might still have fatal bugs to consumers. And with checking only parts it make changing these fragments work without affecting the original behavior of the existing code as a whole.

The program is protected from time and space bound factors. When the tests are done, the code is guaranteed to work under all circumstances even after updates done later. Like mentioned earlier, the whole system is protected from the domino effect of bugs and errors when an edit is done or when a feature is added. This makes sure that while the testing is compartmentalized, its connection to other modules remain.

In development, when the source code is being added onto, the likelihood of bugs increases. This will crash the software and then developers start to panic. Unit tests prevent this from happening since it is guaranteed that the module will not ruin the workings of other programs in the repository. This lets developers confidently add to the system.

Being able to release quick fixes is possible. The program becomes more flexible to quick changes. If a new feature needs to be deployed, there is still a probability that this deployment may cause a domino effect of bugs on the already existing software due to the side effects that the developer may not have predicted.

Many programmers will argue that while there are many benefits to this method, it is too time consuming to be worth it. It makes sense that precautionary measures are already established. The client is more likely to ask for additional functions and edits and this makes unit testing an indispensable process.




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