Python and Ruby developers are big on unit testing. However there is not as much excitement with it in the Java world. Test Driven Development is getting to the point where it is becoming a religion. So if you are doing agile software development, you can expect to also be doing unit testing.There has been a few recent books on JUnit. Aside from that, there is really not a lot new with JUnit. There are also other unit testing frameworks out there such as TestNG. None of these really help with enterprise systems though. They are very hard to test since they have a lot of dependencies. Unit testing is also very difficult with legacy applications.
Like TDD, agile in general is going mainstream. And unit testing is one of the most adopted practices in software. However unit testing seems to be starting to be on the decline. In general it is hard to afford the time required for unit testing. Most projects and developers do basic unit testing. But if an existing system works, it is difficult to justify extra cost to add unit tests.
The goal of unit testing is better code. There are free tools available for unit testing. So the tool cost is usually not an issue. Good unit tests, like good code, require a lot of time and skill. All developers on your team must unit test for you to get the maximum benefit. You also need to do a lot of work with unit tests when you system changes drastically.
On my own project, we are supposed to do unit testing on all new code and any fixes. Previously we were required to generate documentation on the unit test activities. This documentation was inspected at the time of peer review. Now we only have management direction to make sure we do unit testing and produce some tangible results. However there are no checks to ensure this is done. You can imagine the tendencies given a hectic software life cycle where we work.
For a while I was starting to slack a bit with my own unit tests. I would check a few things out, and decide to ship the software based on that. But I am always up to improving myself. One of the areas I determined needed help was my unit testing. I found myself writing a lot of scripts lately to fix problems. I have decided that for every script I write, I would also write at least one other script that performed a unit test. Many times I end up writing multiple unit test scripts to create data, run the tests, and clean up my development environment. Sometimes this uncovers critical bugs and saves the day.
