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The DevOps Handbook, the Testing Pyramid, and Unit Testing

We are reading the DevOps Handbook at work, and today we discussed chapter 10 -- the testing chapter.  I was really excited to see that even in DevOps land, people recognize that more and faster running tests are better.  There were many references to google's testing transformation in the book for those that wanted a strong reference for why automated testing is so important.

I really appreciated that the book referenced the Testing Pyramid and discussed the importance of focusing mainly on large numbers of unit tests instead of large numbers of slower integration/acceptance/ui/etc kinds of tests.  The Testing Pyramid really encourages a large unit test suite as the base of the pyramid as well-written tests.  I agree with this mindset; a large suite of unit tests encourages the coder to really think about the coder's public APIs and how they might be consumed.  Even if the API lives within the same code base as it's consumer because the consumer is just another class, one never knows how long code will live or how many people will come afterward, trying to understand the intention of a class.  A strong test suite expresses the desired uses of an API really well, and many even argue that tests serve as strong documentation.

The thing that bothers me about all of this is that in spite of experts and literature preaching about how important unit tests are, so many developers do not understand unit testing tools, what a good unit test looks like, or why unit tests are desirable or important over other kinds of tests.  Many developers likely think about testing at higher levels of code because these tests more closely resemble desired functionality for the user.  This is a great place to start, granted, but there is so much more to testing.  Tests are great for helping the developer think about the unexpected.  They're also great for helping the developer clean up an API as they realize through the test that certain parameters need to be more cleanly expressed.

I wish I had been taught more about unit testing when I was in school.  Do schools focus on these things much nowadays?  I last took formal coding classes around 2007/2008, so it has definitely been a while for me.  I feel like junit and mockito are the crux of my development kit, and last I checked, these are still very highly used and relevant tools, so at least I'm not falling behind on that front!

I also got to show off one of IntelliJ's testing features to my teammates, which is the built-in code coverage (read: line coverage) tool.  It is always a good day when I get to talk about testing and tools I use for testing.
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