Im am just getting introduced to unit testing and test driven development. Thus far, I have only used Junit as testing framework. A question which emerged and for which I have not yet found a definite answer is: how much test cases do I need to write? Do I have to write a test case for every single class in my program? Or is this a stupid question because unit testing implies testing at the lowest (i.e. class) level?
I think writing a test case for every class is probably the more safe way to go (after all the more you test the lower the number of unforeseen bugs). But I was wondering if there are any widely agreed upon strategies regarding the amount of test cases to write?
There are no strict rules in this area, only guidelines. You usually have one test case per class, but there are different strategies:
For example you can use ‘Per Class’ approach for classes that are relatively small and follow SRP. But if you have legacy code with a giant *Manager class it is fine to use ‘Per Method’ and have dedicated test case for only one of its methods. I think that choosing naming strategy for tests is at least as important as test code organization.
Using code coverage tool can help you find spots of untested code. It is less useful as metric. Having high code coverage does not necessarily mean that you have good tests. At the end of the day what matters is that you have meaningful and readable tests.