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Soon I will be involved in a project that will be using the agile project management/development approach, with 5 (or so) 2 week sprints. The project will be using a DDD design pattern which I have found in the past works great with unit testing, hence I have enthusiasim to use it for this project as well. The only problem is given the following factors I am unsure as to whether unit testing can be successfully implemented with agile development:
I have a feeling that if/when requirements change (especially if towards the end of a sprint) and given the tight deadlines unit tests will become a burden. Anyone have any good advice on the matter?
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Summary: Agile projects assume that test planning, test creation, and test execution take place throughout a project's lifecycle. So the need for unit testing (and especially automated unit testing) can't be ignored and should be considered as a key responsibility of the entire team—not just the software developers.
A unit test, as Agile teams understand the term, is a short program fragment written and maintained by the developers on the product team, which exercises some narrow part of the product's source code and checks the results.
Agile acceptance testing is a combination of traditional functional testing and traditional acceptance testing as the development team, and stakeholders are doing it together. While developer testing is a mix of traditional unit testing and traditional service integration testing.
I think it cuts both ways. On one hand, yes, unit tests are extra code which requires extra maintenance, and will slow you down a bit. On the other hand, if requirements start evolving, having unit tests in place will be a life saver in making sure what you are changing still works.
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Unless you have unit tests with high coverage, the cost of change will grow exponentially as the projects moves forward. So basically, the more change you anticipate the MORE you will actually need your unit tests.
Secondly, good unit tests depend on very few and small feature pieces in your production code. When this is true, only a few tests will be impacted when a feature changes. Basically, each test tests just one thing and small piece of production code. The key to writing unit tests that follow this principle is to decouple your code and test in isolation.
Thirdly, you need to get a better understanding of the concept of DONE and why its definition is so important in terms of sustainable development. Basically, you can't go fast over time in a sustainable fashion if your team compromizes the concept of DONE in the short term.
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