How do you balance testing in object oriented design?

1 What is object oriented testing?

Object oriented testing is a type of software testing that focuses on the behavior and interactions of the objects that make up your system. Unlike traditional testing methods that treat the system as a black box, object oriented testing considers the internal structure, state, and methods of the objects, as well as their relationships and dependencies. Object oriented testing aims to verify that the objects perform their intended functions, conform to their specifications, and cooperate with other objects correctly.

2 Why is testing important in object oriented design?

Testing is important in object oriented design for several reasons. First, testing helps you ensure that your code meets the requirements and expectations of your users and stakeholders. Testing can help you identify and fix errors, bugs, and defects before they cause problems or damage. Second, testing helps you improve the quality and reliability of your code. Testing can help you detect and eliminate code smells, redundancies, inconsistencies, and vulnerabilities that can affect the performance, security, and usability of your system. Third, testing helps you maintain and evolve your code. Testing can help you verify that your code is modular, reusable, and extensible, and that it can adapt to changing needs and environments without breaking or losing functionality.

3 How do you balance testing in object oriented design?

Balancing testing in object oriented design is not an easy task, as it depends on many factors such as complexity, size, scope of the system, resources and constraints of the project, standards and expectations of the industry, and preferences and skills of the team. However, there are some general principles and practices that can help you find a reasonable and effective balance between testing and development. For instance, you can apply test-driven development (TDD) approach which involves writing tests before writing code and then writing code that passes the tests. This can help clarify requirements, design objects, refactor code, reduce debugging time, and increase code coverage. Additionally, you should use different levels and types of testing such as unit testing, integration testing, system testing, acceptance testing; white-box testing, black-box testing, functional testing, non-functional testing; to cover different aspects and scenarios of your system. Automating your testing process is also a great way to save time and effort while improving the consistency and accuracy of your results. You may use tools like xUnit, JUnit, TestNG, Selenium, Cucumber or Jenkins for this purpose. Moreover, following SOLID principles can help create objects that are cohesive, decoupled, polymorphic abstracted and inverted. Lastly reviewing and refactoring your code can help improve quality and readability while eliminating any errors or bugs that may have escaped your testing process. You can use tools like code reviews, pair programming code analysis code metrics or design patterns for this purpose.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?