Build a Solid Software Test Strategy

An effective testing strategy includes automated, manual, and exploratory tests to

efficiently reduce risk and tighten release cycles. Tests come in several flavors:

Unit tests validate the smallest components of the system, ensuring they handle
known input and outputs correctly. Unit test individual classes in your application to
verify they work under expected, boundary, and negative cases.

Integration tests exercise an entire subsystem and ensure that a set of

components play nicely together.

Functional tests verify end-to-end scenarios that your users will engage in.

So why bother with unit and integration tests if functional tests hit the whole
system? Two reasons: test performance and speed of recovery. Functional tests tend
to be slower to run, so use unit tests at compile time as your sanity-check. And
when an integration test fails, it pin-points the bug's location better than functional
tests, making it faster for developers to diagnose and fix. A healthy strategy reqires
tests at all levels of the technology stack to ensure each part, as well as the system
as a whole, works correctly.