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What to learn next

Try reading the chapter on reproducible computational environments and then the chapter on continuous integration. The chapter on reviewing outlines how you can further strengthen your code base by adding a formal reviewing stage to your development workflow.

Further reading

TutorialsPoint has a number of useful tutorials related to testing, as does the Turing Institute. It is also worth looking at softwaretestingfundamentals.com.

Definitions/glossary

  • Acceptance test: A test that the program meets the project’s fundamental requirements.

  • Code coverage: A measure which describes how much of the source code is exercised by the test suite.

  • End to end test: A test that runs the program from beginning to end and verifies that the output is correct.

  • Integration test: A test where units of code are combined and run, and the output is verified to check the units have been correctly integrated.

  • Mocking: Replace a real object with a pretend one to use when running tests.

  • Regression test: Comparing the result of a test before and after the code has been altered. If the output has changed a problem has been introduced somewhere in the program, and an error is thrown.

  • Runtime test: Tests embedded within the program which are run as part of it.

  • Smoke test: Very brief initial checks that ensure the basic requirements needed to run the project hold.

  • Stochastic code: Code which, while correct, does not always output the same result. For example a program that outputs ten random numbers will generate a different result each time, despite being correct.

  • System test: See “end to end test”.

  • Test driven development: A process of code development where unit tests are written before the units themselves.

  • Test stub: Fake implementations of parts of code which are used in testing to remove dependences.

  • Test suite: The tests that have been written for a project.

  • Testing framework: Tools that make writing and running tests less labour intensive.

  • Unit: A small piece of code that does one simple thing. It usually has one or a few inputs and usually a single output.

  • Unit test: A test that checks the behaviour of a unit.

Bibliography

Materials used: How this will help you/ why this is useful

Materials used: General guidance and good practice for testing

Materials used: Types of tests

Materials used: Smoke testing

  • Digitalocean Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Materials used: Unit testing

Materials used: Integration testing

Materials used: System testing

Materials used: Acceptance testing

Materials used: Regression testing

Materials used: Test driven development

Materials used: glossary

Checklist Code reviewing process