Extreme Unit Testing: Ordering Test Cases to Maximize Early Testing

eXtreme programmingTM is one of several lightweight software development methodologies. It involves extremely short incremental release cycles, early and frequent testing, heavy use of design refactoring, and pair programming. Although early and frequent testing is very important, there is little guidance to date in terms of the specifics of the testing process. In this paper, we propose a new process model for what we call “ordered incremental testing,” where guidance on test order is provided. In both of these models, testing is conducted iteratively with very short iteration cycles as a single class is developed.