Project Management – How Much Time Should Be Spent on Unit Testing?

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In a company I used to work for, executives insisted that the code coverage with unit tests must be 99% or more. This resulted in writing more tests than code. It took us literally 3 days to write tests for a single class that took a day to implement.

As a result, however, I learnt a lot about TDD, testing tools, practices etc.

In the company I worked for afterwards, unit testing was an unknown thing. It was something someone maybe heard before. I struggled to introduce them to concept of unit testing, but without effect.

Now, as a self-employed, I wonder – how much time is really necessary to spend on unit testing? Being mostly iPhone/Android developer, which parts of the code should be covered in tests?

Best Answer

The amount of unit testing that is needed depends on several factors:

  • Product Size (The larger the project, the greater the need to include at least some unit testing)
  • Required Quality Level (If you are quickly putting software together that needs to be out as quick as possible and some minor bugs are acceptable, then you might be forced to skip some testing like unit testing)
  • Type of Product (UI's can be unit tested, but sometimes it is easier to skip unit testing on heavy GUI sections of a project and instead test manually)
  • Your Coding Ability/History (What type of bugs do you normally create? Are they things that Unit Testing normally catches or things that another type of testing normally finds. Knowing this might push you to do more or less unit testing)
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