Effective Automated Testing

Agile software development has dramatically changed software construction through the widespread adoption of automated testing and refactoring. There’s more to effective automated testing than simply automating your tests. To achieve maximum benefit, your tests need to satisfy the following goals:

Unambiguous pass/fail: Each test outputs a single bit—pass or fail. No shades of gray, no qualitative output, no interpretation required. Just a simple yes or no.

Self-contained: No setup required before running a test. Before it runs, it sets up whatever environment it needs automatically, and just as important, it undoes any changes to the environment afterward, leaving everything as it found it.

Single-click to run all the tests: All tests can be run in one step without interfering with each other. As with a single test, the output of the complete test suite is a simple pass or fail—pass if every test passes, fail otherwise.

Comprehensive coverage: It’s easy to prove that achieving complete coverage for any nontrivial body of code is prohibitively expensive. But don’t allow that theoretical limitation to put you off—it is possible to achieve close enough to complete coverage as to make no practical difference.

Source of Information :  Paul Butcher - Debug it Find repair and prevent bugs

Effective Automated Testing