Steve Eichert

TDD And Unit Testing isn't Enough

posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 2:28 PM

This story, User Profiles and Exploratory Testing, from Jonathan Kohl is a very interesting one. I often run into people who think that doing test driven development (TDD) and unit testing lessens the need for QA staff to perform their own testing. If every line of code that is written has a set of unit tests driving it's design then exploratory testing is really just duplicated effort, right? Not so much. Test driven development is more of a design practice then a testing one. It just so happens that we get a bunch of automated tests to back up our designs and tell us when changes in our design cause problems. There are some issues that automated tests aren't going to catch. Having a QA staff that is well versed in exploratory testing can help uncover many bugs that the best unit tests in the world will never catch.