Know your testing definitions! Knowing what types of tests there are, what they do, and what they’re used for is very important.
Unit Testing from Wikipedia
“In computer programming, unit testing is a procedure used to validate that individual units of source code are working properly. A unit is the smallest testable part of an application. In procedural programming a unit may be an individual program, function, procedure etc, while in object-oriented programming, the smallest unit is always a Class; which may be a base/super class, abstract class or derived/child class. Units are distinguished from modules in that modules are typically made up of units.
Ideally, each test case is independent from the others; mock objects and test harnesses can be used to assist testing a module in isolation. Unit testing is typically done by the developers and not by end-users.
Benefit
The goal of unit testing is to isolate each part of the program and show that the individual parts are correct. A unit test provides a strict, written contract that the piece of code must satisfy. As a result, it affords several benefits.“
Integration Testing from Wikipedia
“Integration testing (sometimes called Integration and Testing, abbreviated I&T) is the phase of software testing in which individual software modules are combined and tested as a group. It follows unit testing and precedes system testing.
Integration testing takes as its input modules that have been unit tested, groups them in larger aggregates, applies tests defined in an integration test plan to those aggregates, and delivers as its output the integrated system ready for system testing.”
System Testing from Wikipedia
“System testing is testing conducted on a complete, integrated system to evaluate the system’s compliance with its specified requirements. System testing falls within the scope of black box testing, and as such, should require no knowledge of the inner design of the code or logic. [1]
As a rule, system testing takes, as its input, all of the “integrated” software components that have successfully passed integration testing and also the software system itself integrated with any applicable hardware system(s). The purpose of integration testing is to detect any inconsistencies between the software units that are integrated together (called assemblages) or between any of the assemblages and the hardware. System testing is a more limiting type of testing; it seeks to detect defects both within the “inter-assemblages” and also within the system as a whole.”
